Demon Lord 3: Blue Star Priestess (13 page)

Julia
finished and came back to us.  She set the bucket at Red’s feet and looked up at him.  She said, “When I die, I’ll be here with Momma?”

Red
hugged her.  “Yes, love.”

She turned her face to me.  “You’ll be here, too, with me?”

I shrugged.  “Unless Izumi has me stuffed and mounted so she can admire me always.”

Julia turned her gaze back to Red.  “You won’t be here, with us?”

His face reddened so that he lived up to his name.  He struggled to force his voice out.  “I-I’ll try.”  We all knew he was lying.  His clan would decide, and they were a hide-bound lot.

I needed to get back. 
“Listen, Red, keep a sharp eye out.  There’s been trouble here.”  I thought of the black witch.  “And there’s still things going on that could be dangerous.  Finish up here, and go home by the most direct route.  Understand?”

“Really
, Caine, I can sneeze fire and kill everyone in this cemetery.  I’m a freakin’ red dragon.”

“Yeah
, but Julia can’t even light a match yet.”

She
yelled at me, “Hey, I’m working on it.”

“Work on it at home,” I said. 

Red held up a hand.  “Hey, I’ve got that scroll you left with me and a translation—”

“No time now.  Can you drop it off at the clan house before you head home?”

“Sure.  Not too much out of the way.  But you should know the scrolls a death spell, probably what Lauphram once used to sink Atlantis.”

“Fuck me blind!  Make sure you don’t lose that thing.”  The news had hit me like a punch to the gut, but I was on the job.

Priorities.
 

I left them, moving back toward Josie and Zero-T.  As I reached the killing ground, I saw that the chickens had both been used.  Their blood was an iron tang in the air. 
Sunny opened the duffle bag and pulled out a man in his mid-twenties. His tattoos and old wounds easily gave away his gang member status; a Crip by his colors.  His eyes were half-open and glazed.

Drugged. 

Josie and her team were loitering well away, as if this had nothing to do with them, though they were getting good money for this job.  Sunny had the man kneel in front of her.  Using her bloodstained knife, she cut runes into the air over his head. Drops of blood fell onto his forehead, as if her were being baptized.  Sunny paused her chanting and readjusted her grip on the knife, looking into the man’s deer-in-the-headlights eyes. 

A long time crept by.  She seemed stuck.  I wondered if she’d ever taken an actual human life before.  From the sickness spreading out on her face, I decided not.

I took a step forward.

It’s easy to kill in battle
...

Then another
.

In self-defense
…

Sunny
noticed me coming, but did nothing.

For a good reason.
  Like money, or….

Josie gave me room and handed me the blade.

To protect someone.  A city…

I grabbed the blade
, and his long hair near the collar.  The nearness of Death widened his eyes, clearing his mind just a little.  He gulped air, the artery in his throat fluttering in panic.

You just have to be a pragmatic bastard
.

I
sliced straight across his throat.  The nicest sound gurgled out. 

I scowled at Sunny.  “Finish the damn incantation or you’re next.”

The words tripped off her tongue.  As she ended.  I stabbed the man’s heart, I twisted the blade, and opened up the hole so the blood could spurt out properly.  I let go of the man’s hair.  He fell and gave his blood to the grass.

Frozen in place, Sunny stared at me like I was Medusa. 

I grinned at her.  “It gets easier with practice.”  I held the knife out hilt-first.

Sunny snatched it with a trembling hand.   Her eyes called me a monster.  It shouldn’t have mattered.  She was halfway there herself, but something unnecessary in my human side hated that look.
I savagely suppressed that wisp of conscious, and listened to the rhythmic beating of massive wings, getting closer, louder. 

I
drew both PPK’s, thumbing off the safeties.

Hauling his head out of his ass,
Zero-T got the message: 
In coming!
  His Magnum came out of his coat.  He held the gun near his shoulder, its butt in both hands and muzzle pointed at the sky. At the same time, the ground vibrated under our feet.

Josie and her team scramble for cover behind headstones and monuments.

Sunny stood there without a clue.

I smiled.

A shudder went through her.

“Run,” I said.

She did.

THIRTEEN

“Being dead
’s overrated; I try to avoid it.”

                                      —Caine Deathwalker

Zero-T
crouched, weapon ready, his power shaking the earth as if the dead were turning over at high speed.  Lumps of rocks ripped up through dirt and grass, leaving gopher holes behind.  The stones floated in a loose circle around Zero-T, ready to be launched. 

Piercing screams drilled down through the air, almost enough to make my ears bleed. 
I pointed my PPKs up at the crash-diving harpies.  I pulled the trigger, rode the recoil to another target, and shot again, and again.  Losing voice, three of the bird-hags jerked with fresh holes in their head.  I had to dance nimbly aside to avoid one of the bodies dropping on top of me.  The other two smacked the ground, one of them breaking a marker in half.

I saw green flashes of magic near Zero-T as he sent floating rocks careening into the sky, bouncing from harpy to harpy.
  They stalled, back-winging from the rocks, ducking repeatedly as the rocks gave chase. 

That bought me time to look around and see how the magic-users were doing.  Josie was hustling her people out of the area, keeping them low, ducking behind whatever cover they could use.  It looked like most of them were going to get away, having decided that they weren’t paid enough for wet-work.  A chaos wizard in a blue and green paisley robe wasn’t so lucky.  Using his power had bent the laws of probability and now he was paying the price, having drawn the attention of two harpies who were fighting over the pieces.  

I took aim and shot the beak off one harpy. She spun away, crumpling, flapping weakly toward the earth.  A second shot silenced her gurgles.   The second harpy leaped into the air.  I was about to wing her when Zero-T’s Magnum thundered.  The near side of her head acquired a neat hole. The far side exploded into fragments.  She fell out of the air. 

The rest of the harpies kept their distance, circling high, throwing random movements into their glide paths.  A
quick glance assured me the hags weren’t moving off toward Red and Julia. 

I fired, keeping a running count of my shots.  When the last rounds were used, I holstered one weapon, ejected the
spent magazine of the other, and tucked it in a back pocket.  Another pocket provided fresh ammo.  Still undercover of Zero-T’s whirling rocks, I repeated the process with the second gun. 

Zero-T went
down on one knee and put a palm to the ground.

“What are you doing?”
I asked.

“
Vibrations like big fucking steps.  And…”

“And…?”

“The earth tells me we’ve got more trouble on the way.”

With guns reloaded, I scanned the area.  The big steps explained themselves as I saw Red in full dragon form, a great mass of crimson coils, wings snapping out as he roared, a scream of defiance followed by gouts of flame.   Red wasn’t content with spewing fire into the air.  His dragon magic added a glow, edging the flames.  They reformed into
whips, snapping, crackling, splitting harpies in half. 

More rocks burst out of the ground as Zero-T added to the defensive barrage whirling above us.  While the stones kept the last of the harpies off us, he rapid-fired off to the side where the naga had appeared.  These were half-and-half, human from the waist up, snake below.  O
ne of the fire-whips skimmed low and coiled around a naga.  The whip extinguished itself while slicing the naga male into a bloody disks. 

Red was pissing me off.  I didn’t need the help.  I’d told him to get Julia out of here, but apparently, he couldn’t resist a good fight.  I only hoped the kid was safely stashed in a crypt, and would stay put until this was over.

I put my PPK’s away, saving my last clips for a possible emergency on the way back to the island.  It was time for a “nuclear” option, so to speak.  I warmed up my
Dragon Flame
tattoo with a trickle of raw magic diverted from my lifeforce.  I started glowing as flames raced up my arms, sprouting from my torso, dancing along my legs.  I paid for this magic with the feeling that some Aztec priest was knifing open my chest, wrapping grubby fingers around my still-beating heart.  The sensation ghosted away.

Zero-T paused to reload, his stare taking in my human-torch look.  “Holy crap!  I can feel the heat from here.  What kind of fire is that?”

“The flames of my vengeance.” 

The
Harpies had retreated, only to return with naga in their clutches.  The hags bombed us with snake men, but the naga hit Zero-T’s asteroid field and were carried aside.  Battered and bruised, the snakes eventually wiggled through, plopping to the grass under the floating rocks. 

I yelled at Zero-T, “Get to cover!  I’m cutting loose.” 

A geyser of flame peeled off me,
whooshing
over to engulf one naga.  He screamed, blackening and crumbling as I swept the fire over to the naga, then the next.  And still more of them came on, rippling across the grass, winding around headstones and monuments.   Seeing what had happened to their buddies, the new naga didn’t close in.  They hung back, using cover, raising modern weapons.

“They’re using guns now?” Zero-T said.

He was answered with a hail of bullets from AR-15s.  He ducked behind a stone angel.  The rocks in the air streaked off into the naga, punching through headstones, arcing over crypts to reach those in hiding.  Another marble angel was shattered, and the female naga behind it was bludgeoned heavily.  The stones broke bones, crushed organs, and lobbed themselves skyward. 

Falling, they continued the attack until she was just a bloody smear.

I fanned a hand and formed a shield of dragon flame.  The roiling fire swallowed incoming gunshots, melting the slugs, steaming the liquid away just as fast.  Nothing got through to challenge my Kevlar vest.  The overhead protection was gone, but Red’s fire-whips cleared the last of them away.   From the booming sounds, it seemed Red was now stomping the naga flat, so I didn’t worry about him. 

I saw motion from the corner of my eye.  A bunch of naga were trying to flank us, circling around to our blind side. 

I pooled flames in a cupped hand, while the other hand kept the fire shield up.  The entrenched naga—what was left of them—were trying to splatter brains, going for head shots.  I compressed the fire I held in my palm, piling on the pressure.  Like a bullet, I launched what I held.  I hit a startled naga in the face.  The whole head exploded.  The decapitated body fell backwards, twitching as death claimed it. 

Zero-T used his earth magic to bring several angels to life, animating them so they fell on lurking naga with reckless abandon.  Stone fists, feet, and knife-edged wings made quick work of
the circling naga, giving us a break in the action.

My dragon flame dying out,
I jumped aside, snatching out a gun, as one of the smaller monuments fell back on hinges, revealing a shaft leading down into the ghoul warrens.  One of them stood in the shaft on the rungs of a ladder.  He had on a matte black, hooded cowl to shadow his pasty white skin.  Round sunshades covered his eyes as he surveyed the battlefield.  Several other markers fell back.  More of them waited in the mouths of shafts, working up nerve to dare the sunlight.

“Just us preternaturals,”
I called.  “Come on out.”  With my guns, I took out several nagas without aiming.  The back of their heads exploded, splattering on others of their kind.  I wasn’t trying to, but I gave the ghouls the cover they needed to collect the bodies.

T
he ghouls crept out, easing into daylight like it might burn them.  They scurried about, spines curved like old men and women.  Their fingers were long, flat, and broad—clearly designed for shoveling through dirt.  Like ants to a picnic, they swarmed the freshly dead and made quick work of hauling them toward the shafts. 

One ghoul
paused near me as he passed.  He said, “Once these get nice and ripe, they’ll be damn tasty.” 

I
shrugged.  “Whatever.” 

I stared across the graveyard to where I’d left Red and Julia.  She was still out of sight, but Red towered above the surrounding structures.  The harpies and naga were dead or fled, and Red was shedding mass in the process of returning to human form.  The red of his scales had gone pinkish and he’d bled off half his size, when something silvery whizzed in and exploded against his long neck.  He screamed.  Blown to the earth, trailing smoke, he flailed weakly, gouts of blood spurting from multiple wounds.

The back of my mind analyzed what I’d seen, providing the most likely answer:
FGM-148 Javelin, two-man fire-and-forget anti-tank missile.
  Somewhere around here was a sonuvabitch with a fifty-pound, reusable launch tube.  As I ran, I kept an eye out for other silvery streaks riding on exhaust flames.  That no more missiles appeared wasn’t really surprising considering each javelin cost $78,000.  I knew that because I’d been trying to buy a few for myself on the black market.

Whoever was behind this invasion had come with more than renegade mountain giants, nagas, and harpies.  Bringing an anti-tank weapon to a gun fight, they were not to be underestimated.  Which I’d done until now, but no more being a half-brained window-licker.

I got half way to Red, when I heard Julia’s piercing scream.  Red was hurt, but he was a full-blood dragon and would heal rather quickly.  Julia shot straight to the top of my list of my priorities.  Ignoring Red’s screeches and rumbles, I veered for the crypt where she still should have been hiding.  I hurtled a headstone, weaved around a bigger monument, and kept moving, waiting for a target to offer itself. 

Nagas slithered toward Red, as he lost definition, his bright red paling while he tried shifting back to human form.  Running, I pointed both guns to my left and shot as many naga as I could.  I stopped firing as a wall of rock went up around Red, giving him cover. 

A monstrous shadow fell over me as something huge blocked the sun.  A friggin’ roc swooped down on me: big as a dragon, mostly black with red-feather trim, it had a curved, golden beak and talons that might have carried off an elephant.  I jumped clear, but lost control as the bird’s wind stream sent me rolling.  I stopped face up, emptying my PPK’s into the oversized eagle, as it climbed on wings so loud, I heard nothing else but thunder until it moved off. 

  Scrambling up, I raced on toward Julia, hoping I’d be in time.  If not…  Well, there was a terrible darkness inside me itching to slip its chain and go medieval on someone’s ass.  This just might be the day I went full dragon again.  Hearing the roc scream high above, I wished I had voluntary control of that change.  I’d give the roc some golden lightning to chew on.

I reached the crypt and found its door ripped off the hinges—as well as the ugliest Mountain giant I’d ever seen.  This one was no runt.  Crouched over Julia, he showed me his hazel-colored ass, not a view I’d recommend.  The movement of Julia’s chest reassured me she wasn’t dead. She looked like she’d passed out and fallen to the grass.  Somehow, she still clutched her stuffed dragon.  His black-button eyes stared at me in reproach for letting this happen. 

And lying next to her head was the white scroll with the Atlantean death spell on it.  The truth hit me like a brick between the eyes: that spell was what all this drama was about.  A spell of unspeakable power would always be an irresistible prize.  

I need to get the mountain giant’s attention and draw him away from Julia and the scroll. 

His stony hide would resist the regular rounds I was left with.  Better to go with dragon fire.  I warmed my
Dragon Flame
tattoo.  Again, the payment in pain slammed through me like a wrecking ball.  Though he hadn’t moved, I felt as if the mountain giant had slammed me between two massive paws.  The sensation faded, replaced by tongues of flame that licked my body, covering me in ember-colored light.  The grass I stood on flared up, incinerated almost instantly.

I thrust out my arms and flung fire across the giant’s ass and back.  It took him a couple seconds to feel the heat through his stone skin, but he wheeled around to face me, protecting his eyes from my fire as he roared a challenge.  I backed away, taunting him
.  “Hey, fugly, what are you doing here?  Shouldn’t you be raping a cactus, or sticking rocks up your ass?” 

I went to throwing lesser amounts of fire, as if I were running out, backing up at high speed.  He followed, slow and relentless, but with a stride that still ate up the
ground.  My dragon fire sloughed off him, but caused damage: bubbling, warping, and causing his skin to sag like creeping lava. 

I backed toward a boxy marker.  It fell over, tripping me.  I slammed to ground under the hooded stare of a ghoul who’d surfaced to scrounge for vittles.  “My bad,” he said.

Encouraged by this development, the twenty-foot mountain giant increased his pace, bearing down on me like an avalanche. 

The ghoul saw the giant and ducked down the shaft.

I threw out a wall of fire and rolled aside.   The giant’s foot came down where I’d just been.  The fallen monument exploded into flying fragments.  A hand-sized chunk creased my temple.  I felt stunned, off balance, my thoughts hovering just out of reach, a hit that hard would have killed a human.  I was glad to be alive, let alone awake.