Demon Games [4] (7 page)

Trey swore, kicking at the ground with his bare foot, and hurting his toe in the process. ‘You complete and utter dickhead!’ he shouted at the Fire Imp. ‘Do you know what you’ve just done? Do you?’ He pointed down at the broken pieces. ‘That wasn’t just a mobile phone!’

Dreck carried on delving in the bag, not even bothering to look up at the ranting boy. ‘Oh, I know they’ve got all sorts of gizmos and applications on them these days, but like I said, you can buy another one when you get back.’

Trey was so angry he was unable to speak. He turned his back on the nether-creature, clenching and unclenching his fists and issuing a great long string of curses and swear words that even Tom would have been proud of.

‘Aha!’ Dreck said, and threw a pair of canvas trainers in the boy’s direction. ‘I forgot to bring socks,’ the Fire Imp said with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘but I remembered these.’

Trey turned to look and saw that the Fire Imp was holding out a pair of large, cumbersome-looking handcuffs. ‘You need to put these on too.’

Trey’s mouth was hanging open. He stared at the metal restraints dangling from one of the demon’s claws and shook his head in disbelief. ‘As if all this –’ he gestured around him – ‘wasn’t unreal enough. You smash my phone up, tell me I have to stroll around the place as a human, like some meal on legs, and to top it off you want me to wear those?’ He pointed at the handcuffs turning in the air in front of the demon’s face. ‘No way.’

‘They’re more for show than anything else. If you
did
have to transform into your lyco form, they wouldn’t be able to hold you.’

Trey frowned as he looked at the demon. ‘I can see you,’ he said in a small voice. He walked over to stand by the Fire Imp.

‘Hmm?’

‘When I’m in my human form I can’t see nether-creatures – just the human mantle they wear.’

‘That’s in the human realm. Here in the Netherworld I don’t have to wear that ridiculous carapace. You can see me for what I am, whether through human or lycanthrope eyes.’ The demon nodded at the handcuffs again. ‘You really do need to put these on.’

Trey puffed out his cheeks and was about to say something else, but stopped himself. Instead he shrugged his shoulders resignedly and slipped the manacles over his wrists. He stared at Dreck. ‘You’re sure this will work?’

‘No. But right now I don’t think we have any other choice than to give it a go.’ He pulled the last item out of the canvas sack: a whip with a long, heavy-looking handle. He nodded in the direction that they should walk, gesturing with the whip for Trey to lead the way. ‘Let’s go, prisoner,’ he said in a cheerful voice.

Trey glared at the demon.

The Fire Imp cleared his throat. ‘Please?’

Trey nodded, and they set off.

Caliban let the demon’s lifeless body slip out of his grasp and fall to the floor.

He looked down into the sarcophagus at the figure that still lay there. He had not anticipated the revival of Helde to be as arduous as this; he had already dispatched five demons, allowing their blood to be absorbed by the thing in the coffin. And yet the creature showed no signs of reanimation. Yes, there had been glimpses that the process was working: that initial long sigh when he had sacrificed the Pit-Shedim, and since then he’d witnessed one of the arms lift slightly, a finger extending before collapsing back down into the gloomy depths of the coffin. But beyond these, there was no sign that his sorceress was any closer to being resurrected.

He would dearly love to give this task to one of his minions, to wash his hands of this whole sordid business until it was completed and the thing was done. He had no problem with the killing of demons, but he preferred other prey: prey whose blood was crimson and sweet, and not the black and fetid filth of these nether-creature sacrifices.

He looked down at the lifeless form again. But it couldn’t really be described as lifeless: the countless thousands of insects that made up the body were in constant motion – a giant colony of black shiny bodies bound together to create a whole. A cruel smile crossed the vampire’s lips. He loved the grotesquery of this form. He loved it because he knew how much Helde would hate it. She had been the Netherworld’s most powerful sorceress, and legend had it that she had been a creature of great beauty. And when Caliban had been turned into the undead being he now was, and had discovered the Netherworld, he had been besotted with the idea of her: with her power and her beauty. But he had never met her. She had long ago been killed by a demon lord fearful of her power, a victim of the ancient Demon Wars.

He hissed in impatience, turning from the raised dais that held the sarcophagus, and was about to leave when he heard a small noise from inside the stone coffin. The vampire kept quite still, straining to see if his hearing had simply fooled him, when he heard it again. He hurried back to peer inside, breathing in sharply when he saw movement on Helde’s lips.

She was trying to say something. She was trying to communicate with him!

He bent further forward, pressing his ear to her mouth to catch any utterance that she might make.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What is it you want?’

He waited a second.

‘More,’ the figure in the coffin managed.

‘More?’

‘Blood. I need more . . . blood.’

The vampire swallowed, the sound loud in his ears. ‘And if I get you more, will you come back? Will you come back with all the powers you once possessed?’

‘Yes.’

Caliban narrowed his eyes and studied the thing before him.

‘And will you use those powers to help me bring the humans to their knees? To help me become master of both the Netherworld
and the
human realm?’

There was a pause, the creature in the coffin struggling to articulate the words.

‘Yes,’ she managed.

‘Then I shall get you the blood that you need.’ The vampire stood up. ‘I shall get it, and together we shall wreak havoc.’

Hag called out for Lucien to enter even before the vampire had a chance to knock at the door to her dwelling. He smiled at this; it had been a long time since he’d seen the old sorceress, and he’d forgotten how alert she was, despite her apparent frailty. He glanced behind him to see if Moriel was still there, but the battle-angel had gone, silently disappearing into the skies overhead. He didn’t bother to look up; even if she was directly overhead, he knew she’d be invisible to him now.

Hag’s new residence was almost identical to the one the vampire had visited years before: a ramshackle and dilapidated affair which looked as though at any moment it might fall down around the ears of its occupant. It sat at the edge of a huge burning sulphur pit, and Lucien turned for moment to watch the almost invisible blue flames licking across the blood-red surface. Noxious fumes filled the air and he quickly turned away and pushed at the door.

If anything, the stench that hit Lucien as he crossed the threshold into the sorceress’s house was worse than that outside. The air was thick with the reek from whatever was cooking on the pot-bellied stove – a truly unpleasant smell, sickly sweet and cloying, as if something rotten and putrid had been boiled up.

The old woman was hunched over the stove, her back to the vampire. She made a grunting sound, waving her visitor towards two chairs that sat facing each other in front of an ornate fireplace in which a huge fire burned. Without a pause she continued the low murmurings of her spell.

Lucien eyed the shadows behind the sorceress, looking for the creature that guarded the old woman so fanatically that she could call visitors into the house without even turning round to see if they posed any threat. He saw it in the corner, and the thing looked back at him from baleful eyes as black as the shadows that hid it.

Hag had grown the mandragore a very long time ago, nurturing the plant root with milk and blood and honey until it had eventually taken on life. It was usual to free the mandragore at this point, but Hag had kept the creature chained down in a vat of milk, adding blood and honey each day for a further year until it had grown into the enormous thing that glared back at the vampire from the darkness. It was the perfect guardian for the sorceress: mandragores are almost impossible to destroy, and are ferociously loyal to their creators. But Hag had grown the creature for more than just its brute strength and durability – demons are unable to enter the place where a mandragore resides, so Hag slept well in the knowledge that her home was off-limits to the vast majority of nether-creatures that might wish her harm.

Lucien had seen the creature before, but he was still taken aback by its appearance: more tree-like than anything else, thick, muscular limbs hung down from a body that was coarse and bloated like the bulbous root it had been grown from. A horizontal slash below its eyes served as a mouth, and it opened this now in a threatening gesture that treated the vampire to a view of the black emptiness within. If a mandragore screamed, every living thing in the vicinity would be killed, but Hag had removed her sentinel’s voice a long time ago.

Hag tut-tutted in the creature’s direction, and Lucien couldn’t help but smile as it lowered its massive head, looking at the floor between its feet like a scolded child. It slipped further into the shadowy corner of the room, sulking.

Lucien moved away, glad to be able to put some distance between himself and that terrible smell. He took one of the seats and waited.

He looked around. Like the outside, the interior of the place was exactly how he remembered the sorceress’s former dwelling, and he briefly wondered if this might not actually be the same house uprooted and transplanted to a new spot. The shelves were crammed full of jars, boxes and bottles of every size and description. Stacked up on the floor were cages containing live animals. From small rodents to larger animals like cats and dogs, the menagerie was a miserable one, and the smell of fear that came from the creatures added to the stink of the place.

The old woman swore and kicked at the stove, making some of the boiling mixture spill out of the pot on to her foot. She issued a fresh string of expletives and curses before turning to regard the vampire with a fierce glare.

‘Ruined,’ she said, gesturing at the pot behind her. ‘Do you see what you’ve done? Coming here uninvited like this. Are you happy?’

‘You knew I was coming, Hag. Do not pretend otherwise.’ He used the only name he’d ever known her by – the only name anyone knew her by. ‘Moriel sent word that she would be bringing me.’

Hag shuffled towards him, moving into the dim light for the first time and looking down at him. She narrowed her eyes and ran her tongue over her toothless gums before settling herself into the chair opposite his.

Lucien took in her face. It was ancient and unpleasant. Hag looked back at him, unblinking under the vampire’s scrutiny. She’d lived in this realm for as long as Lucien could remember, lured here from the human world by the prospect of uncovering lost secrets of the dark magic she’d studied so assiduously throughout her life. He had never known her look any different from the way she did now; if she’d discovered the elixir of everlasting youth, she’d done so too late.

‘And to what do I owe the pleasure?’ she said.

Lucien opened his mouth wide, pulling his lips back to reveal the vicious fangs which hung down from his upper jaw. He hissed at the old woman, a sinister and threatening sound.

The mandragore began to move out of its corner, but Hag halted it with a lift of her hand. If she was intimidated by the vampire, she gave no sign of it. Instead she tutted at herself, shaking her head, ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘how rude of me. I haven’t offered you anything.’ She pulled her grey hair back from her shoulders to reveal the scrawny, alabaster neck beneath. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ She laughed raucously, the ugly sound filling the room as if she had just told the funniest joke ever. She looked up into the vampire’s stony face, and the laughter slowly died away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said once she’d got herself under control again. ‘Just an old woman’s silly sense of humour.’

‘As you can see,’ Lucien went on, this time holding up his hands, the backs facing the sorceress, so that she could see the talons there, ‘your magic appears to no longer be working.’ He returned his hands to his lap, and his pupils blazed a terrifying orange-gold that wiped any sense of mirth from the old woman’s face.

There was a perfect stop, the animals all falling silent and remaining perfectly still; every one of them – even the frogs and newts in their aquatic prisons – stared unmovingly at the vampire. Lucien’s eyes held those of the sorceress. ‘I am not happy with this, Hag. And I do not appreciate your. . .jokes.’

The old woman managed a small nod by way of an apology.

After a moment the room sprang back to life again.

Hag cleared her throat. ‘You must tell me what happened, Lucien,’ she said.

Hag sat, listening to Lucien chronicle everything that had happened to him: how he had taken the lycanthrope boy, Trey, into his care; how Caliban had captured his daughter; and how he and his vampire brother had fought. He told her how the bite wound on his shoulder, and the infection that came about as a result, had nearly ended his life, and how he believed that the wound was the cause of what was happening to him now. He explained how Trey had stolen Mynor’s Globe from Caliban and brought it back.

‘. . . and that is why I am here now. To see if you can help me as you helped me once before.’

The old woman sat silently throughout his narration, frowning here and there, but never interrupting. When it was clear the vampire had finished, she tipped her head back in her chair, running her tongue over her gums while she thought. When she leaned forward and spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper.

‘You are already dead, Lucien.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You described how you were in a coma-like state, and how you thought your brother’s attack would ultimately lead to your death.’ She studied him for a moment from beneath her brow. ‘But you are already dead. You have been dead for over two hundred years. When your brother ended your human life and made you into a vampire by giving you his infected blood, you died. Have you forgotten that?’