Chapter 10
Strange Things Go Bump In The Night
Mike didn’t seem surprised when he caught us in the middle of one of the hottest kisses I’ve ever experienced in my life. No. Really, by the end of the afternoon I had to ask for some lip balm because my face felt like someone had left my mouth outside in the Sahara at high noon with a magnifying glass lying on top of it. Before he had a chance to lecture the two of us about demonic seduction (and before Angie sprouted more horns and threw him across the room), I explained to Mike that whatever spell of corruption her demonic disposition held over other males didn’t seem to be affecting me.
Not too much, anyway. I still had to push away the sense that things were moving out of control between us. “It still shouldn’t be possible,” Angie said. She wore a look of disbelief, but who could blame her? One day wasn’t going to convince anyone. I was having enough trouble sorting through all of these feelings myself.
Max wasn’t ready to buy any of it either. He indicated the loose bed sheets with a flick of his hand, and wanted to know if we had engaged in activities I will only describe as premarital, and leave at that.
“Succubi don’t corrupt and tell,” Angie snapped in a most prim and Victorian manner.
I was more blunt. “I think she’d burn my parts off,” I said. I wasn’t comfortable talking about the issue, but I knew where Mike was coming from. For better or worse, we were all connected to something as insanely dangerous as it was nebulous, and if we were going to live through our situation, everything needed to be laid out on the table so nothing could creep up on us in the dark and bite us.
And in the Playground, nearly everything bit.
“That’s not what has us worried,” Mike reminded me.
Mike could just speak for himself on that matter. The girl’s insides were like a supercharged easy bake oven, and I didn’t want any part of me to be the thing that got easily baked.
“Look guys, I know this is sudden, but what’s happening here isn’t about lust or desire.”
Max had to stifle a sarcastic laugh. “We’ve all got eyes, Jack. Don’t even try telling us that you aren’t attracted to Angelica.”
Attracted? How was I going to explain to them how I felt? “I genuinely care about her,” I said. My face flushed, but I had to say it. “I don’t care about sex. Not with Angie. Something inside of me knows that I’m supposed to be with her. I don’t know how to explain it.”
And God help me, I really didn’t.
Angie’s face blushed, and she made a smart comment about how insufferably cheesy I was becoming, but along with that blush, her eyes opened wider and she stopped breathing. Her fingers squeezed mine quickly.
Max scratched his head. “Mind if I put a little slice of that speech on a hamburger.” Then he asked me, “Was that hundred percent cheddar, or mostly processed cheese?”
Max may have been an ass, but he looked at Mike and hesitatingly told him, “I’ve seen cases of demonic oppression and domination, Mike. That didn’t sound like either of them.”
Mike nodded his head. “Angelica, have you ever heard of one of your sisters—reformed or infernal—talk about anything like this?”
Angie shook her head in response to Mike. “No. We cannot touch real cases of Love, and I’m not talking about the sappy shit in the movies and dime store books . . . I mean Love with the capital L. No one has ever felt this way about someone like me. Not that I’ve ever heard.”
“And how does Jack make you feel,” the vampire’s voice was quiet and loaded with gravity. “You’ve done a complete one-eighty on him that’s left us baffled.”
“When my curse is active, I cannot stop myself from doing the things I do—a flirtatious remark of provocative insinuation is all it takes to implant an idea. Men are so easy to fire up. At the height of my powers, all I have to do is step into a room and feel the men around me fill with desire and dark temptations. If I want to, I can take any man I want, or compel him to betray his spouse, desire his sister, tempt a coworker—”
Angie stopped and nervously eyed me to gage my response. I squeezed her shoulder.
“Anyway, you get the point,” she said, ashamed. “I really can’t stop it Jack. I swear.”
I smiled at her. “That does not change what I feel about you,” I repeated.
After all, exactly what did I feel for her? I just didn’t know.
Angie leaned her superheated body near mine, I think because she felt safer near me. “Please raise a window,” I said to Calli. As she did, a cool, salty breeze blowing from a quarter of a mile away swirled around me.
“I feel safe around you,” Angie said, addressing me directly. “I knew something major had happened the night we met. When you were unconscious after that crazy thing you did charging one of my kidnappers, I couldn’t take my eyes off of you. Our skin touched as we lifted you into the SUV, and I felt as if I already knew you. You scared me. That’s why I was so rude to you.”
I brushed several loose strands of hair out of her face as she kept talking. “I’m not as good at talking about my feelings. I’ve always been that way. It was safer for me. I’ve been on my own for as far back as I can remember . . . been taken advantage of, used for free labor, free gratification.” Angie shivered with revulsion as memories flowed trough her mind.
I nodded my head. “I’m sorry.”
Angie shook her head quickly. There was more to her life that she wasn’t sharing. I knew that, even though she hid it well. Now wasn’t the time to press her on it. “What do you make of that?” I asked Mike.
I didn’t get to hear Mike’s response because the lights suddenly went out, plunging the room in darkness and anything else he said was drowned out by the crashing of multiple windows in the hall outside of the bedroom we occupied. Calli let out an alarmed shriek as dim nightlights came on, revealing little beyond our startled faces. She leapt up from her chair and began taking her cardigan off. Angie was on her feet, and yanked me by the arm with superhuman strength, hauling me toward the bathroom door.
“Cut it out!” I demanded. I had to get out into the hall so I could protect her.
Angie slung me into the bathroom and said in a voice as hard as rock, “Lock the door, Jack. You’re too hurt for this!”
Just then, three shadowy, vaguely human shapes burst through the door. “Night prowlers!” Mike snarled.
Max drew a pair of revolvers from beneath his jacket and began firing at the prowlers. The weapons, two Eastwood and Branson fifty calibers roared like small cannons, spitting gouts of fire from their muzzles like hiccupping dragons. The dark forms jerked and stumbled back as Mike rushed one, striking it with a viperous right hook that caused the thing’s head to explode like gelatin and splatter across the wall behind its body.
“Light!” Mike shouted. “It’s the only thing that will stop them!”
Indeed, the two figures Max had unloaded on shook themselves briskly, and I heard twelve bullets tumble out of the dark masses comprising their bodies. Max backed away from the advancing forms, quickly reloading his weapons.
“It was the flash from the gunfire that hurt them,” I shouted to Max.
“Yep,” the wereschnauser said between clenched teeth.
Meanwhile, Mike’s decapitated assailant staggered around in a macabre headless dance. The gooey fragments of its head adhering to the wall began wriggling like tadpoles and appeared to be converging on one central spot. I knew once enough of them clumped together, the uncoordinated body would be able to reassemble itself.
Calli let out an and angry command to attack, and the cardigan on her body leapt forward in a burst of speed, moving hypnotically through the air so quickly I had trouble making out what the thing was.
One
of the prowlers lunged at Max before he had a chance to aim his revolver, forcing him to duck its attack. He was too slow to avoid the creature’s fingers, and let out of scream of intense pain as the prowler’s blow left some of it’s dark matter clinging to his bearded face like sticky putty. Reeling from the agony blazing across his cheek, the monster would have fallen on Max if it had not been for the billowing form of Calli’s cardigan, which no longer resembled a cardigan at all, but a bizarre alien creature from an H.R. Geiger painting. The once-upon-a-cardigan wrapped its stretchy body around the prowler, emitting a high series of furious screeches as it began savagely tearing at the prowler’s dark body.
“How hot can your body get?” I frantically asked Angie.
“I thought I told you to lock that door!” Angie snarled at me.
“How hot?!” I demanded.
“Pretty damned hot!”
I pulled out an unused roll of toilet paper. “Hot enough to light one of these?”
Angie let out a delighted yelp and snatched the thing from me. Cradling the roll in her hands, Angie focused her attention on the object with intense determination. Her silver eyes shone like bright, wintery stars, and the room suddenly lit up as a ball of fire flared to life in her hands. Screams so shrill and piercing that they soared beyond the human auditory range provoked agitated howls from dogs in the surrounding area. A chorus of canine calls outside of the window joined the prowlers’ tortured cries as they began to distend and lose coherence. I tossed Angie another roll, which she added to the first, feeding the hungry ball of flames in her hands. The prowlers attempted to scrabble away from the hateful source of light, but the succubus-girl stepped into their path with a gale of tinkling laughter.
The monsters in the room flailed and shook in spastic gyrations, and the surface of their bodies started boiling. I seized the moment and snuck around behind Angie to grab Max’s floundering legs and drag him away from the cornered and bubbling prowlers. The assailants lunged at us in the flickering firelight even as their dark masses slowly peeled and evaporated away. Mike added one of the pillows from my bed to the fire and tossed the blossoming wreath of newborn flames into the center of the floor.
The loudest wail yet erupted from the things, and they converged like mating amoebas into one large, shapeless form that poured itself through the open window with enough force to crack the frame and send fissures snaking across the wall. Moments later, Calli’s once-upon-a-cardigan flitted back into the room, where it settled around our hostess’s shoulders like the good and obedient article of clothing it ought to be. I had the fleeting thought that anyone wanting to get their hands down her pants was going to be in for a highly unpleasant surprise.
If I ever have a daughter, I swear to God I’m going to get me some of those things.
Max twisted in agony on the floor. Angie looked at me as if she wanted to apply some of the stuff that had gotten onto his face to my bottom, and I heard her mutter under her breath, “ . . . always has to be a hero.”
Calli knelt at Max’s side and pulled his hands away from the wound. I winced when I saw the damage the prowler had inflicted. The entire left side of Max’s face looked as if someone had poured acid over his head. “I’ve got to call for help,” she said.
I looked at Mike’s hands. Luckily, he wore gloves.
“What about the xenomorphs? Can they help?” I asked, avoiding Max’s melted face.
“This would just kill them,” Mike said in a grim voice. “Werewolves heal quickly, but prowlers are used against supernatural beings because they’re toxic to just about everything.”
I nodded my head and asked Calli where her flashlights were kept. Angie, who was busy tossing the burning bits of pillow and toilet paper into the bathtub, growled, “Oh no you don’t!” before I started down the dark hallway. “You’re not going anywhere alone.”
“I’ll show him where the lights are,” Calli said. “We’ve got to check the breakers, anyway.”
Angie slid smoothly between Calli and me. “I’d rather not have to neuter your cardigans and put you down,” she glowered, then her voice turned as prim as a proper Victorian lady’s. “I think we can find everything, thank you. We’ll only be gone a bit.”
I closed the door behind us as Calli led our little band into a more secure room. A long row of shattered windows allowed the winter night to pour its cold fingers into the house. Two moons painted the saltmarsh in a bone-white coastline dreamscape. When the unmistakable shape of a pterodactyl soared across the face of one of the principality’s moons, I shivered, thinking of the other predators out there in the dark. Somewhere just below the window I thought I heard grasshoppers rattling in the grass outside. The things had to be tough to survive on a night like this.
Angie huffed past me toward Calli’s kitchen, flicking her tail back and forth, warning me that nothing I was about to say was going to mollify her. “Would you wait on me?” I complained. “My leg’s throbbing.”
“I bet Calli can fix it for you,” she sniffed. “She would have been quite happy to pull your pajama legs up and—“
“—And nothing,” I said indignantly. “She doesn’t have the kind of tail you do,” I teased.
Angie stopped once we got to the kitchen, and spun around. Her voice took on a pert, dangerous clip as she came at me with a question out of left field. “Jack, I don’t have feet like other girls you’ve cared about. Did you enjoy rubbing their feet when they hurt?”
My own feet suddenly started to itch as my inner robot screamed at me that now was a perfectly prudent time to excuse myself to the bathroom. I knew if I did, though, Angie would just ask if Calli was hiding in the commode bowl. “Ummm, I never really thought much about it,” I said, deciding that lying was the best tactic to survive right now. I used to love massaging Liz’s feet.
Angie looked at me with her arms crossed and a skeptic’s scowl across her face. “What are you going to do for me when my hooves are hurting?” she demanded.
I raised my hands and shrugged my shoulders. “Get a hoof pick?”
Angie’s face grew red and her horns started to lift upward again. I felt heat wafting off of her in waves. Instinctively, I quickly took her hand in mine. Scalding pain made my hand spasm reflexively, and Angie jerked her fingers away in alarm.
“Jack!” she gasped. “Why would you do something like that?” Her eyes dropped to where I protectively held mine with the other hand.
“Because this isn’t about me and you,” I said. “That demonic influence was getting the best of you. I know you can feel how deeply I care for you. I don’t care about any other girl. Besides, you were about to iron my pajamas and set the kitchen on fire.”
Angie looked abashed. “Jack . . . I don’t know if this can ever be romantic between us.”
I tilted Angie’s head up toward mine and then stepped back and shrugged. “That doesn’t bother me,” I said. Honestly, it didn’t. “I’m just as confused as you are.”
Just when I thought she had calmed down, she snapped, “There are flashlights in that drawer.” The demon in her wasn’t done indulging its jealous side. “If any other girl touches you, I swear I’m going to chop her up and send her remains to the zombies.”
“Now that’s a good succubus,” I said, checking to see if the batteries worked.
From outside, I heard a loud commotion as the gate protecting the garden entrance to Calli’s property crashed open with a loud bang. I immediately grabbed Angie by her shoulders and forced her behind me. In the dimly lit kitchen, I opened a drawer by the sink and grabbed the first knife I spotted. Behind us, I heard glass crunching as something walked across the debris in the hallway. “We’re surrounded!” I said fearfully.
The frame housing the kitchen door groaned and started making s
plintering noises. Metal shrieked as something tore the screen from its hinges. Suddenly the door before us blew outward in a splintery rain. Angie growled like a cornered animal as flaring lights jabbed into our faces.
Intruders on both sides of us held rifles pointed directly at our heads, shining spotlights strong enough to floss our brains with high-energy streams of photons. I exercised the only option I had. I took a small flashlight from the countertop, said, “Two can play at this game,” and turned it on right in the face of the closest person to me.
I don’t even think the man blinked, but a deep, no nonsense voice did ask, “Are you Jack and Angelica?”
“That depends,” I said. “Are you a girl in disguise who secretly wants to hit on me? Because if you are . . . sweetheart, I don’t think you have enough guns to protect you.”
Angie stomped her hoof and pinched me. From the back end of the house, Calli called out in a tense voice, “It’s okay guys. Really, it is.”
“When this man takes his gun out of my face, I’ll take my flashlight out of his!”
Someone walked into the kitchen from the hallway and said, “It’s all clear, sir.”
The guns and their lights dropped from our faces as Calli emerged into the kitchen. “I have an injured man in the back who needs treatment soon.”
“Mister H is ready for him, ma’am.”
When Mike joined us, I asked, “How’d everyone get all military on us all of a sudden?” Even with only the light of two moons filtering in through the windows, I easily recognized advanced tactical gear adorning our new arrivals. Most of the men sweeping the house were dressed like someone ran out of SWAT uniform accessories and started using stormtrooper costumes to fill in the gaps.
“I have a feeling we’re about to find out,” he said in a low voice. “I knew she had connections because of the number of people she’s helped me hide in the past . . .”
“But these are Connections,” I said, placing a heavy emphasis on the last word.
We were hurriedly ushered into waiting vehicles that appeared to be floating on cushions of gauzy air. The things were larger than our stolen SUV and looked armored with enough plating to laugh off an end-of-the-world apocalypse and complain about not being challenged with enough violence. As we fastened ourselves into waiting harnesses, I saw a number of soldiers carrying Max out on a stretcher.
Our transport barely made a purring sound as I watched the ground recede beneath us. I had to blink several times to be sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me, because the craft felt like it hadn’t even slipped from park into neutral. The soldier whose gun barrel had almost gotten intimate with my nose must have read my mind, because he leaned his head toward me and said, “Inertial control makes these things feel like you’re sitting still. You won’t feel a thing until it passes MACH four.”
“Is that going to happen?”
“No way. We’re only going as far as Jekyll Island,” he said. “Just a hop, skip, and a jump.”
Even as the soldier said this, I saw that we were descending as rapidly as we had lifted off. I almost let out a frightened scream as we veered toward the ground. The veined expanse of a tidal marsh dotted with the skeletal fingers of moss-covered cypress trees sped into sight at an alarming speed. The scene immediately changed as the craft breeched some sort of illusion generating field, because we were suddenly hovering above a landing port attached to an enormous mansion rising up out of the dry edge of the wetlands.
“Dear Lord,” I said. “Did you know something like this existed this close to your convent?”
Angie’s eye twitched in annoyance. “No,” she said in a reserved voice.
The door beside me opened, allowing the rank, muddy scent of decaying vegetation to fill my nose, yet I had to admit that after sitting beside Angie for several minutes, the coldly bracing air felt nice.
Our rescue detail escorted us through a set of heavy wooden double doors with a Janus faced emblem carved into its polished surface. Inside, warm lighting revealed a long hallway decorated with wainscoting that ran half the height of the walls. Large sumptuous paintings filled the other half, making me feel like I had just walked into an art gallery—only, when I looked closely at the canvasses, I saw indistinct shapes and shadows peeking out of the corners of the frames and staring back at me.
The fall of hard-soled boots echoing around the next corner announced the approach of someone of importance. I was able to tell as much by the determined strides as I was the unexpected orchestral accompaniment of John Williams’s Imperial March. The music seemed to be coming out of thin air around us.
A tall, handsome man, bearded, with streaks of silver running through his hair rounded the corner wearing a dark silk Armani suit. He smiled brightly at Calli, and waved an annoyed hand in the air, complaining, “Pachelbel! I said I wanted Pachelbel!” When the music suddenly shifted to the fifth movement of Berliotz’s Symphonie Fanatstique, the stranger frowned and let out a sigh.
“Never promise a ghost orchestra a new music hall and try to explain to it why a building delay is holding up the project. They won’t have any of it.”
“When did you get the ghost orchestra?” Calli asked.
“After this one was about to be evicted from its old haunt. Apparently the musicians thought it would be amusing to play Vivaldi in the middle of an Eminem concert.”
Calli laughed, and then told our host, “I can’t thank you enough for your help, Edward.”
Edward sadly inclined his head. “Things are getting rough, Calli. My teams are stretched too thin as it is, and now something hits this close to home! I’m not going to let this go on any longer if I can help it.”
Calli gestured to the three of us. “Ed, these are the friends I told you about.”
The man named Ed looked us over with sharply penetrating eyes; I noticed a scarred indentation on the right side of his head encompassing his entire temple. Ed noticed my scrutiny and turned his head slightly, removing the blemish from my view. “I do indeed know of Mike Cavenaugh’s good deeds,” the man said happily. He clapped his hands together with delight, and said, “The man’s practically an underground legend!”
“The wounded man is Max,” Calli added. “And these two are Angelica and her boyfriend, Jack Pittman.”
Edward’s eyes moved back and forth between Angie and me as he noted her demonic features. His eyebrows lifted at this, and he inquired happily, “Indeed? Girlfriend and boyfriend?”
Calli nodded her head. “I think they may be the real deal.”
“Amazing!” he exclaimed.
I shuffled my feet uncomfortably. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to use the boyfriend/girlfriend honorific. I knew Angie wasn’t either.
Feeling a bit too much the center of attention, Angie turned sarcastic, and asked in a snappy voice, “And I suppose you’re Dr. Jekyll or is the H everyone’s calling you short for Mr. Hyde?”
“Yes,” our host said in a deeply melodious voice. His eyes sparkled with intelligence and were alive with merry danger. “That is exactly who I am!”