Aspen (17 page)

Raven looked at Aspen. “Stay behind us and keep your eyes open, I’m sure this place has more than one staircase. If you see anything, kill it and stay safe.”

Aspen didn’t get to respond, the boom of Jynx’s Colts filled the hallway and three of the vampires exploded into clouds of ash and sparks that fell to the floor like black snow. Aspen covered her ears against the noise and Raven stepped into the fight. Flame shot from the barrel of her pistol and she executed two of the raging vampires with clean shots to the head. She grabbed a third and ripped its throat out in a spray of blood and threw a forth that recoiled in surprise. In that moment she shot it and another that was trying to get behind Jynx. The thunder of her Automag echoed off the walls and made Aspen’s teeth hurt.

Jynx turned and kicked an advancing vampire in the crotch with the silver toe of her boot then shot it in the head at point-blank range. It was still falling to the floor when she shot two more and stepped back to reload. She grinned at Raven and said, “See? Isn’t this more fun than negotiating?”

Raven rammed the barrel of her pistol into the eye of the vampire to her right and squeezed the trigger. It exploded into flaming ash along with the one behind it, leaving her pistol dripping blood and gore the spattered on the ashes at her feet.

“You have a weird idea of fun, Jynx.”

Jynx fired off another series of shots that all hit home with deadly accuracy. The corridor was becoming slick with ash and blood. “I hear that a lot. Tell me this isn’t more fun than pushing paper around a desk!”

Raven fired twice more and ejected her pistol’s magazine. A vampire reached for her while she reloaded and Aspen pushed it away with her shield. Raven smiled her thanks, rammed the magazine home and started shooting again.

Just a few moments later, the shooting subsided. Raven and Jynx stood side by side in the quiet, their boots covered in ash. Aspen took her hands away from her ears and straightened.

“Is that all of them?”

Raven reloaded again with fresh magazine from her jacket. “One took a runner down the stairs, but unless he’s got more friends we should be okay.”

Jynx wiped blood off the barrel of one of her pistols and holstered it. “That was the most fun I’ve had in weeks. It was like a shooting range with actual targets!”

Raven holstered her own weapon. “Those were living beings, Jynx, try to remember that.”

Jynx shrugged. “For a given value of living, sure. Don’t be a killjoy.”

Aspen shook her head. “Vampires aren’t all like that, Jynx. Most of Raven’s family is perfectly normal, as long as you keep them out of direct sunlight.”

“And give them plenty of eyeliner,” a new voice said.

Aspen knew that voice. She’d never expected to hear that voice again. She turned to see a tall, white-haired vampire standing in the middle of the corridor. He was wearing some kind of body armor that looked like black scales and held a matched pair of gold Desert Eagle pistols. Men in similar uniforms stood behind them, automatic weapons held at the ready.

“No,” Aspen whispered.

“No!” Xavier mimicked. “You thought you’d never see me again, didn’t you, my little purple-haired girl?”

Raven stepped in front of Aspen and drew her pistol. “Xavier. I’d say it is good to see you, but I still think you’re nothing but a flaming turd waiting to be squashed. How are you here? I seem to remember cutting off your head and kicking it through a wall.”

Xavier rubbed the soul patch beneath his lip. “Our sire has mysterious powers, dear sister. Mysterious powers. And now I’m here to reclaim that which is mine.”

Aspen shook her head and closed her eyes. Xavier was there, somehow, to take her away, to take her back.

“Not in this lifetime. Aspen is blood-bonded to me, now. I don’t know how you got here, but it’s time for you to leave,” Raven said.

Xavier stepped closer and Aspen could feel him rooting around in her head. “Your grip on her seems tenuous, sister. Perhaps you should have followed the ritual instead of making up your own.”

Aspen used the wall to support herself and fought back against Xavier’s intrusion. “Get out! Get out of my head, I don’t belong to you!”

“Oh, but you do, little purple-hair,” Xavier said.

Raven’s hand shot out and she grabbed him by the throat. “No, she doesn’t. I claimed her in your absence, she is mine. You and your merry band of slimeballs can go back to whatever sewer you crawled out of and leave her alone.”

Jynx joined Raven and pointed her pistols at Xavier’s renegades. “Hi there! I don’t think we’ve met. My name is Jynx, I kill monsters for a living.”

“This piece of shit is my older brother, Xavier. I killed him, once,” Raven said.

“You didn’t do a very good job, Ray. Did you miss?”

Raven kept staring at Xavier. “I didn’t miss. I cut his head off with a sword and kicked it off his shoulders.”

“Impressive. So…not that I am questioning you, but how the hell is he here?” Jynx asked.

“My family has a bad habit of coming back from the dead.”

Pain thundered through Aspen’s head and she sagged to her knees. It felt like Xavier was inside her, pulling her strings again. She squeezed her eyes shut and fought. In her mind’s eye she could see the thread that connected her to Raven. She held onto it, drew strength from it and let that strength fill her. She opened her eyes and glared at Xavier, who Raven still held at arm’s length.

“I am not yours. I am Raven’s by choice and by blood. Her strength is greater than yours will ever be!”

Xavier stopped choking and smiled at Aspen. A blade magikally appeared in his hand and he ripped it along Raven’s stomach. It happened so fast Raven never had a chance to react. She screamed in pain and let go, only to fall to the ground in a bloody heap.

Jynx opened fire with her pistols. Six bullets pierced Xavier’s heart in the space it took a normal man to take a breath, but they passed through him like smoke. He stepped close to Jynx and tried to gut her as he had Raven. She dropped her pistols and caught his hand just as the blade nicked her flesh. Her arms vibrated with the effort of keeping him from ripping her open.

“Asp! A little help!” she yelled.

Xavier smiled. “She can’t help you, she’s pathetic and weak. Just a little witch in over her head.”

Smiling like a madman, he forced the blade inch by blood-soaked inch through her belly. Jynx’s cry of pain was choked off by the damage to her abdomen. All she could do was choke and spit blood. Xavier kissed her cheek and let her fall to the floor.

Aspen stared at Raven’s body, she watched as the green eyes she adored faded from life to death. She couldn’t believe it. She’d seen Raven hurt worse before, why wasn’t she healing?

Xavier squatted in front of her. “Now, little one, my friends will take Dr. Wright and you will come with me. We have much to plan, you and I.”

His death squad stood aside to allow four men to pass. They wore loincloths made of buckskin and carried spears. Their skin was wet-looking metallic silver that shimmered when the moved and their eyes were solid black pits. They shuffled past into the laboratory and Aspen heard Dr. Wright scream in pain and horror.

She couldn’t move. Raven was dead, Jynx was dying and Xavier was going to take her again. She was alone.

You are never alone.

She blinked and saw the four silver men exit carrying Dr. Wright between them, then her view was blocked by Xavier, who offered her his hand. It was still sticky with Raven’s blood.

“Come, my pet.”

Aspen shook her head and scooted away on her butt. “No.”

You are never alone.

It was Raven’s voice, echoing in her head. Aspen looked at Raven’s body and felt a flood of emotions. Fear, remorse and sadness all were present, but it was anger that made itself known. Aspen looked at Xavier and felt her magik flood through her body. She pushed him away and rose.

“I am not going anywhere with you.”

Flame erupted from her fingertips, bathing Xavier in its hellish radiance. He screamed, a horrible noise of pain and terror that was cut off as his tongue burned and his eyes melted. Aspen stepped over his charred carcass and turned her wrath on his men. Her magik fire danced with them, held them, and cooked them in their own armor until their blood boiled and ran from the gaps, where it pooled on the floor in a hot, sticky mass.

When it was over, she dropped again to her knees between Jynx and Raven. She rolled Jynx over and looked at the wound. She’d seen enough to know it was mortal.

Jynx spat blood and whispered, “When you get out of here, tell Piper I’m sorry.”

The light faded from her eyes and Aspen lowered her to the floor.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Devil’s Lake, MO 12:00 p.m.

Aspen knelt in the blood and ash between Jynx and Raven. She held Raven’s hand and felt it growing cold. It wasn’t right, she should be healing, should have healed. The wound just wasn’t enough to kill someone who had survived being run through with a katana.

You’re never alone
.

Those words kept echoing in her head, in Raven’s voice. She could feel them, almost hear them being said to her from a distance.

Aspen wiped tears from her eyes and tried to think. How could Raven have said those words? Be saying them now? How could she have known about the Chradnutia?

“Think, dammit!” she said aloud.

She stood and wiped Raven’s blood on the wall. It made a red smear on the concrete that Aspen barely noticed. Her brain felt like she was trying to think through cotton wool.

She looked back at Raven’s body. Even in death, she was perfect. Perfect hair, perfect lips, flawless, unmarked skin that showed through the tears in her silken blouse…

Aspen frowned. That was odd. She knelt and tore the silk away from Raven’s shoulder. The skin beneath was perfect, with no scars or other markings. Aspen ran a thumb over the flesh and tried to focus on that one thing; the smooth skin. Unmarked skin where there should have been a tattoo. Aspen had never seen it, but she’d heard about it and there should have been a ‘laugh now, die later,’ tattoo on her shoulder.

“You’re not real,” Aspen said.

She straightened and looked around. It was starting to make sense, how Raven looked, how she showed up just in time, how she acted. Everything.

“You’re not real.”

She started walking down the hall the way the silver men had taken Dr. Wright. She kicked the door open and started down the stairs at a run. At the bottom she crashed through the fire door and ran into the heart of the almost abandoned parking lot. The sky above was dark and swirled with black and grey clouds. There was a faint golden sun somewhere behind the clouds, but there were no birds, no insects, nothing else. Not even the trees were moving though she could feel a breeze on her skin.

“If Raven wasn’t real, none of this is. Nobody is more real to me than she is.”

She turned in a slow circle. “Do you hear me, whatever you are? This isn’t real! My Raven is out there looking for me, none of this is real!”

There was a sound, like the rush of wind at the edge of a hurricane, the sound that ghosts make in bad horror films. Then, one by one, things began to melt away. The world became a kaleidoscope of color and pain that swirled around her and made her feel as if she was being torn apart and crushed at the same time. She screamed at the sensations flooding through her and fought to hold on. The hospital melted away, then the parking lot and she was left in a swirling blackness full of pain.

She sat up screaming. Her body felt like it was crawling with insects and her eyes hurt so bad she could hardly open them. When she did it was to find that she was lying in the dirt beside the remains of the campfire she and Jynx had enjoyed an eternity ago. The fire was still burning as if only an hour or so had passed.

Jynx lay nearby with blue foam dribbling from her mouth. Aspen crawled forward and rolled her onto her side. “Come on, Jynxie, I know it was bad, but you’re alive. I know you’re alive, give me a sign here.”

Jynx coughed and spat out a gobbet of blue phlegm. She wretched on the sand and more of the blue mucus came out, dribbling from the corners of her mouth. She wiped the residue away and collapsed back on the sand.

“How come I’m not dead?” she muttered.

Aspen held her hand. “Because it wasn’t real. Whatever this is, I think it can cause shared hallucinations. Do you remember Raven?”

Jynx nodded. “Yeah. She saved my ass a couple times in that fight, and I saved hers. I see why you’ve got puppy eyes for her.”

She rubbed at the bare skin of her belly as if checking for a wound. “So, that douchebag Xavier, none of that was real?”

“No. I suspect Xavier is dead. Very very dead. The real Raven killed him to free me,” Aspen said.

Jynx probed one nostril and tossed the blue mess onto the fire. “It was so real. I felt his knife, I smelled the gunpowder. Where did all of that come from?”

Aspen poked at the fire, sending sparks into the evening air. “Our subconscious. What better way to keep us here until it can feed on us than to make us think we’re fighting off monsters and struggling to survive?”

Jynx sat up and rubbed her head. “I knew I’d seen that fucking ash and the weird church before. It’s from a bad horror movie Piper and I saw at the drive in.”

She raised her eyes and looked at Aspen. “That means you didn’t kill Clanton. He’s still out there with Mal, isn’t he?”

Aspen met her eyes. “Yes. But the good news is, if I can beat the one you had in your head, one that is made up of everything that scares you, then the real one won’t be so tough.”

She rolled up her sleeve and showed Jynx the livid blue lines on her flesh. “But we have bigger problems. Whatever it is, we have it. Considering how I feel and you look, we don’t have much time to find whatever is causing it and stop it.”

Jynx huddled closer to the fire. “I’m open to ideas.”

“I have one. Something my subconscious Raven said about this being something similar to a disease but not a disease. What if it is some kind of venom?”

“You mean like from a snake?”

Aspen scooted closer and picked up the notebook she’d been holding before she passed out. “Yes! Remember the weird liquid that came out of the wound in Martel’s neck? It is similar to cytotoxin left behind by a snake bite.”

She rubbed the bite on her neck and found a small wound weeping liquid. She showed it to Jynx. “I bet that’s how we’re infected. I have one, you probably do, too.”

Jynx rubbed the back of her neck then wiped her hand on her jeans. “Okay, so is it an insect or something? How do we fight insects?”

“I don’t think it’s an insect. We didn’t invent Dr. Wright, she’s here, somewhere. I have a hunch that the cell thing she mentioned in the mine is also here. We just have to find it and trap this thing back inside.”

Jynx pulled herself to her feet. “I’d rather find it and kill it.”

Aspen stirred the fire again, the ashes and coals were coming alive. “I’m not positive we can.”

“We’ll know that when we find it, and I have a hunch of my own.”

She pulled her father’s diary from her jacket pocket and began sorting through it. “Remember when I said there were pages missing? This is what I was looking for. Something Wright said struck a chord.”

She showed Aspen a page with the same hieroglyphs that Wright had drawn. “My grandfather found these, a long time ago. They were written on the outside of a cave out in New Mexico.”

Aspen smoothed the page and tried to make sense of the elder Kane’s notes. “He says that local legend speaks of something they called the Dying Sleep.”

Jynx looked over her shoulder and pointed to a section written in red. “And that it was traced to a thing called a Djinn that they trapped inside the rocks.”

Aspen handed the book back. “So you think this is the same thing?”

Jynx flipped more pages. “Gramps did. He listed one of the possible locations of others, one of which was a missing Missouri mine. I didn’t make the connection, Piper probably would have.”

“I don’t suppose he said how to trap or kill it?”

Jynx closed the book and stuffed it back in her pocket. “No. His research didn’t go that far. I guess it was on Dad’s ‘to do’ list when he died.”

Aspen hefted her gear bag. It felt like it weighed a solid ton and her shoulder sagged under the weight. “Do you think you are up to driving?”

Jynx coughed and spat, then jerked open the door to the Charger. “Why not? It isn’t like there is any other traffic out here.”

Aspen tossed her gear into the back seat and climbed in. Jynx brought the engine to life and tromped the gas.

“Head north, toward the mine,” Aspen said.

“Where Wright said it would be.”

Aspen consulted her map. “Yes. I think whatever was in our heads, this Djinn, it draws on reality to fill in the gaps. If the doctor was right, then we should find the cage near the mine somewhere.”

“Then let’s put this bastard back in his box.”

II

Downtown Chicago, IL: 10:30 p.m.

Raven pressed the accelerator and guided the Bass through evening traffic. Many American cities had been called “the city that never slept”, but they had nothing on the Windy City, where offices and businesses ran on world time. The streets were crowded, even this late, and getting between taxis and private vehicles without scuffing the paint or running over a pedestrian who couldn’t read crossing signals took all her concentration.

Levac flipped the switch that activated the police lights and pointed. “There! Black SUV turning right. The plate matches.”

Raven changed lanes and drifted the Bass around the corner in a cloud of burned asphalt and exhaust. The driver in the SUV must have seen them because it surged forward under hard acceleration.

“Why does everyone run?” she muttered.

Levac gave her a lopsided smile. “Are you kidding? If I saw you coming up behind me in this thing, I would run, too.”

Raven didn’t look at him, she was too busy avoiding people who thought a siren meant ‘stop in the middle of the road and panic’. She tapped the brakes and threaded the Bass between two sedans and turned left behind the SUV. “You keep talking like I’m scary. I’ll have you know I am as calm as a Georgia peach.”

The SUV swerved to avoid stopped traffic and climbed up on the sidewalk. Raven followed, cursing under her breath.

“You’re kidding, right? Last week you broke the coffee maker,” Levac said.

“That wasn’t my fault! Some idiot let the coffee boil out instead of making a fresh pot,” Raven replied.

The SUV cleared the end of the street and turned with the Bass close behind. When she saw an opening, she pressed the gas and the Bass roared up beside the SUV.

Levac rolled his window down and held up his badge. “Pull the hell over!”

The SUV swerved, almost hitting the Bass. Levac called out in pain and recoiled from the impact.

“Are you okay? Keep inside the car!” Raven yelled.

Levac rubbed his sore hand. “I lost my badge!”

“We can’t go back for it, just call in a replacement,” Raven said.

Levac shook his head and moaned, “It’s the third this year. IA is going to chew on my ass like a puppy toy.”

Raven glanced at him. “How have you lost three badges this year?”

“You know that cute blonde girl who moved in across the hall? I’ve been letting her do my laundry, but I keep forgetting and leaving my badge in my pants pocket. When I get them back, it’s always missing,” Levac said.

The SUV swerved then turned the other way, barreling down a narrow alley. Raven turned at the next and followed in a parallel course. She could see the SUV kicking up sparks as it passed between buildings and she used that as her guide. Garbage cans and other debris bounced off the Bass’ grill and hood, but she kept going, only wincing at the impact.

“What do you mean you ‘let’ her do your laundry? You should be paying her hazard pay!”

Levac shrugged. “We trade off. She does the laundry, I bring the mail, and carry out all the trash. It’s a ten story climb!”

Raven slid the Bass into the next street. The SUV was just ahead, accelerating toward the highway entrance with sparks trailing from the rear bumper that was dragging on the pavement. Raven downshifted and pressed the gas, making the Bass fishtail.

“She’s still getting the raw end of the deal. Call this in, I don’t want this bastard getting away,” Raven said.

Levac picked up the radio mic and started speaking. Raven didn’t hear what he said, the SUV had crossed three lanes of traffic and was now racing down an industrial road between the old warehouse district and the train tracks. Near the end of the road, the brake lights came on and the back window blew out in a spray of glass. Raven felt a brief moment of terror then hit the brakes and swerved. The rocket propelled grenade the thugs had fired missed the Bass by inches and exploded against the warehouse behind them, sending plumes of fire into the sky.

Levac’s jaw dropped. “Was…was that an RPG? That was an RPG!”

“I noticed! Keep your panties on!”

She chewed the inside of her lip and blinked, awakening her monster. The steering wheel moaned under her fingers and she pressed the gas. The Bass roared after the SUV like an angry tiger chasing prey.

“Ray, they have RPGs, what are you doing?” Levac yelled.

“I doubt they have two launchers. They’ll have to reset,” Raven yelled back. “Just get ready to take the wheel.”

“Take the wheel? Have you lost your damn mind?”

Raven guided the Bass between the train tracks and the fleeing SUV. The rear passenger window lowered and the faerie who seemed to be in charge leaned out with an MP5 in her hands. Raven grabbed Levac’s head and pushed him down just as bullets rained down from the SUV. The high-velocity slugs passed through the Bass like it was butter, only to vanish harmlessly into the upholstery.