Demon Lord 4: White Jade Reaper (7 page)

But he was drooling like a zombie. 
Chocolate.  Must have chocolate.

I squeezed off a burst.  The recoil was minimal.  The
THUDDA-THUDDA
of the AA-12 put an end to arguing.  The rounds proved to be armor-piercing high-explosive.  Big holes appeared in Tukka, kicking him back into a shelf that splintered under his falling mass.  His bowels voided noisily as he shuddered, rasping for breath.  Red blood splatter painted everything around him

Can’t kill … Tukka—he main character!

“Not in my book,” I said.

Fake Grace screamed, “Tukka, noooooo!”  The sound spilled out across town.  Across the country.  To the edge of space.  Out past distant galaxies.  Where somewhere, a fifty-foot swamp snail lifted its head in startled surprise.  Just for the hell of it I shot Grace’s face off.  Her body called from somewhere, her voice still a whisper.  “Go into the light!  You must return to the great melting pot in the sky and be reborn as a milk chocolate bunny.”

“I don’t want to go,” Ghost Girl said.  “My killer needs to be punished first.”

A deep voice said,
Oooooooh!  Tukka ghost now.

I wheeled back, sweeping the auto-shotgun up to fire.  A murky translucent version of the fu dog was hovering above his body.  Tukka wore a wet, brown sheet, with eye holes cut out so he could see.  My heightened sense of smell caught an unpleasant odor.  I used a hand to cover my mouth.  “Unholy crap!”  He smelled like he’d bathed in excrement.  

Tukka looked at himself. 
Tukka chocolate!

Not really.

The fu dog’s head moved under the sheet, down and to the side.  I heard the chomp of oversized teeth and saw broken fragments of brown drop to the floor.  There was a loud swallowing sound, then another chomp.  Like the great snake Ouroboros which eats its tail in an ever diminishing circle, the ghost of Tukka consumed himself, becoming rapidly smaller.

Gagging, I turned away.

In time to see a headless Grace strong-arming Ghost Girl into the golden light.

“Let go of me!” Ghost Girl demanded.

I squeezed off a round that separated one of Grace’s arms into two pieces. 

“Shoot and golly!” she whispered.

But I was too late; stumbling, off balance, Ghost Girl fell into the light and was gone. 

Leaving the shop, I plunged into the light, ready to kick down the Gates of Paradise and bring the little girl back to Earth, but the light collapsed as I hit it, and I fell for a long time.  If Bill and Ted showed up on this bogus journey, I planned to frag their asses.  The darkness thinned to midnight purple, and I seemed to slow down.  Eventually, I sprawled across the grassy mound of a grave.  The pastel glow of pink and blue toads on the nearby trees illuminated a small graveyard.  I looked up at the closest headstone.  It said: Ϭ Ͽ ϴ ⱺ ꜛ ♫ ♠ ≈ ∑ Ω ^.

Weird.  A secret code?  Oh, yeah, I’m asleep.  The reading side of my brain is dormant. 

I drew my limbs in and pushed at the ground.  A wavelike motion returned me to my feet as I straightened.  Looking over the headstone, I saw myself, a mirror image in a cage of black iron.  I held the bars, staring back with a look of utter boredom.  I needed a shave.

“What are you doing in there?” I asked.

He held up a hand and a Rock Star energy drink magically appeared.  He opened it and took a long pull, sighing with satisfaction.  I would have expected something alcoholic, but then, this was a dream with its own logic.  “I’m keeping myself under wraps, after all, I am the most valuable thing I own.”

A tiny voice shrieked from the ground beside him.  “Let me outta here!”

I moved around the headstone to where I could see.  Inside his cage sat a second, tiny cage, this one gold, holding a miniature golden dragon.  I said, “That’s supposed to be my inner dragon, I take it.”

“You can’t take it,” the Rock-Star me said.  “He’s mine.  Mine!  Mine!”

I looked at the sports drink in his hand.  “Dude, how many of those have you had?”

The tiny dragon said, “Yeah, well, I got a cage of my own.”

I stared down at the feet of the dragon.   He had a two-inch cage there made of grass and twigs. 

Inside was an inch-tall version of me.  “Who’s got who?” the tiny dragon shrilled.  He spit and a yellow jag of electric fire shot into the turf and extinguished itself.

Damn.  I’m getting a headache.

The big copy of me with the sports drink grinned in what was supposed to be a friendly fashion.  It was a little scary to watch.  He said, “Look here, this nice guy stuff ain’t going to work.  It ain’t me.  I’m all chaos and murder with a little fucking thrown in.”

I looked at him.

“Okay,” he said, “with
a lot of
fucking thrown in.  That’s who I am, what I do.  I know Old Man wants us to develop a less aggressive leadership style, but we’ve always got by just fine by clubbing down all dissent and swiping whatever we wanted.”

I nodded.  “I know, right?  What’s the point of changing now?  Everyone’s used to my leadership style.”

The tiny dragon called up to us.  “Anyone care what I want?”

All three of my selves spoke in unison.   “Not really.”

The dragon spat again.  “This is so fucked up.”

“Then get your own dream,” I told him.

The chirping of crickets and the distant hoot of an owl were cut off in a moment along with a night wind.  The Rock-Star me stared over my shoulder.  “Oh, my.”

I turned and looked.  The graveyard was still in place, but the surrounding forest was gone.  Endless blackness spilled away into infinity.  Out in that terrible abyss, red eyes stared back.  Without scale, it was difficult to know if this dark presence was close or far, huge or cosmic.  A red mouth opened under the eyes, a fanged mouth.  A white cylinder emerged like some kind of tongue.  There were fingering holes on it. 
A flute made of white jade.
 

“Oh, demon scat,” the dragon said.  “He’s going to play again.”

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“Prophetic dream,” the dragon said.  “You’re supposed to figure that out yourself.”

Rock-Star me said, “His name is…”

A wall of sound hit me like being swatted by a building.  I staggered back, bouncing off the black iron cage.  It burnt me through the black silk, sequined jump suit I’d somehow changed into.  I smelled smoke.  I felt pain.  Can’t be, I’m not fey.  I sank to my knees, covering my ears until the muffled roared ended.  I felt wetness. 

I think my ears are bleeding
.

Rock-Star me said, “You’re a fey lord now, bound to a fey kingdom.  Iron’s going to burn you, in your dreams, if not the real world.”  He sighed in mock sympathy and grinned again.  “Unfair, I know.”

And suddenly, Ghost Girl was at my side, a regular looking nine-year-old in pink dress.  Matching ribbons tied up her ponytails.  She met my gaze with eyes that were cornflower blue, a shattered violin in her arms.  She used the bow, stabbing with it toward Flute Face.   She shrieked.  “There he is!  Get him.”

But the flute was playing again, a cutting sound that cut into my bones like a meat cleaver.  The graveyard was rolling like a sea.  Headstones toppled.  Skeletons clawed their way out from wormy black soil, leaving the best parts of themselves behind.  They stumbled about, hands clapped to the sides of their heads where ears had once been.  The ghosts of the dead hovered above their remains, screaming in pain, their ectoplasm rippled savagely in the unholy piping.

“Shit,” Rock-Star me said.  “Now you’ve let him wake the dead.  If he eats too many of those, we’ll never stop him.”

SEVEN

“Pigs have made themselves essential

tohumanity: they give us bacon.”

                                      —Caine Deathwalker

Evening had settled in by the time I stirred awake.  Groggy, on autopilot, I staggered to the bathroom with my shaving kit and a change of clothes.  I stripped.  A warm shower brought me a small measure of alertness.  I shaved, and dressed in a black, handmade Italian suit with gold stitching.  The crimson shirt had black stitching.  The only concession I made to the heat was to leave off the tie.  My dirty clothes went into a plastic bag from my suitcase.  I pulled on my steel-toe boots, and then considered my guns.  The Old Man had been lecturing me lately about not being so predictable in my methodology.  He’d actually said, “Violence as a first response to everything gives you too high a profile.”  I’d promised to work on it.  Besides, packing weapons in a shoulder harness under a coat among casually dressed tourists was obvious as hell. 

My new satchel was the answer.  I picked it up from the floor near the bed and unzipped the soft leather case.  I threw back the lid.  Inside, on the bottom surface, a small spell circle had been inscribed with demon runes.  This was the same spell as the one in my armory that let me call forth my sword when I wanted it, through an altered space.  I put my guns and a butt-load of filled clips inside.  Every time the guns returned to the case, the spent clips would be exchanged for fresh ones. 

I zipped the case shut.  My fingers tingled with raw magic as I activated the dormant spells.  Now for a test...  My hands hang at my side, empty.  I swept them up like a cowboy drawing six-shooters.  I aimed across the room as my Berettas materialized in my closing grip.  I set the semi-automatics on the bed.  With a thought, I reactivated the spell and the guns magically returned to the satchel.  A smile stretched my face. 
Sweet. 
Since my Berettas had the same come-and-go capability as my demon sword, I no longer had to encumber myself with holsters.

The silence finally caught my attention. 
Where are the girls?

I looked around.  Their stuff was here, but they’d bailed on me.  The key to the room was missing as well.  Really, the girls didn’t seem to understand that waiting on my every whim was a great privilege.  Under the theory that they’d stepped outside for air and a change of scene, I decided to check the parking lot before calling Grace up and ranting at her and Madison. 

  I stepped out, closing the door behind me, and moved along the railing to the stairs.  They took me down to the parking lot.  There were no girls.  No sign of Onyx.  And my car was gone.  In the back of my mind, I heard the Old Man’s voice:
Try being a kinder, gentler sociopath.  Bond your subordinates to you.  Let loyalty, not fear, be the word of the day.

Loyalty, my ass.  If there’s a single scratch on my baby…

My phone had Grace on speed dial.  I punched the number for her and waited for the connection to go through, staring past the parking lot at the desert landscape beyond.  In the near distance, off to the side, a plume of dust heralded a little excitement.  There seemed to be a small herd of something stampeding past. 
Javelinas?
   It was my first time seeing the wild pigs.  The adults were sixty pounds, standing over two feet at the shoulder.  A broad swath of bristles ran from the backs of their heads, down their backs.  And they had six inch fangs, uppers and lowers, which gave them their name;
javelina
was Spanish for javelin.

After numerous rings, Grace’s voice finally unfurled from my cell phone.  “Yeah-lo?”

“Grace, where’s my car?”

“We, uh, sorta borrowed it.”

“I did notice.”  One of my Berettas materialized in my free

hand.  I lifted the semi-automatic and aimed at the lead pig, tracking his motion.  “Where are you?”

“Burger World.  We got hungry.  Don’t worry, I’ll do you a favor and not tell Cassie you were starving me.”

“How wonderful!”  I smiled like a crazy person.  For some reason it seemed to come easy.  “And I suppose I’m expected to let you live?”

“We’ll bring you back a burger and some curly fries.”

“A bacon cheeseburger.  I have a sudden urge for bacon.”  I moved my muzzle from the stampeding pigs, interested to see what was chasing them.  Sighting down the barrel, I saw another plume of dust, a smaller one.  There were three pursuers,
chupacabras
, Spanish for goatsuckers.  They were dusty hazel-colored beasts with stubby tails, raptor claws, spikes down their backs, and big black eyes.  The world lurched as my vision morphed from human to dragon.  It was like staring through high-powered binoculars. Details were much clearer.  The reptoid vampires had long prehensile tongues wagging out of their mouths.  The tongue-tip bore three three-inch fangs. I personally believed them to be the descendants of stranded aliens. 

“One question,” I said, “how did you manage to bypass the security devices on my car?”

“Apparently—against my orders—Onyx stowed away for the trip out here.  I agreed to forgive him in exchange for him using his shadow powers to possess the car so we could drive it.”

A thought send my weapon back to the satchel in my room.  “Okay, swing by a liquor store, have Onyx get me some Jägermeister and Red Bull.  Tell him I give permission for him to kill whoever he has to.”  Dropping a shot of Jägermeister into a sports drink is a Jägerbomb, the American variety.  In Europe, the shot is dropped into beer.  Watching the chupacabras had made me thirsty.  And having booze with her might just keep her alive when I see her next.

I killed the connection and put my phone away, continuing to watch the hunting chupacabras and their intended prey.  Not having a dog in that fight, I didn’t really care to root for either side. The hindmost pig skidded to a stop, turning to face the goat-suckers.  This was intended to let the rest of the herd get away.  The guardian pig would go down, of course, but might do some damage before he died.  That was my hope anyway.

I want to see some blood.

The three chupacabras slammed into Doom Piggy.  A dust whirl sprang up like the Tasmanian devil was cleaning house.  Doom Piggy slashed with his tusks.  A goat-sucker went down, throat ripped away.  By then, prehensile tongues had flipped the pig on his back and pierced him with incisors.  The surviving chupacabras carved up the pig’s stomach and a flank with their freaky claws.  Squeals of distress spiked, then fell off.  I didn’t need to notice the sudden stillness or glazing eyes to know Doom Piggy was gone.

I was about to go back to the room when a Hispanic maid came out of a ground floor apartment, pushing a cart loaded with cleaning supplies, towels and sheets.  She looked hot, about twenty-five, her lustrous black hair tied in back.  She wore an apron over street clothes instead of some special uniform, and smiled as she passed.

I felt the monster in my pants stirring with equal interest.  There was something special about her scent, something not quite human.  I drew a deeper breath. 
A shifter? Fey?   No, something else.

“Good morning, sir.”  Her purred words were accompanied by the slight squeak of a cart wheels and a little metallic rattle.  “Can I help you?”

I grinned at her.  “Most people think I’m beyond help, but there are a few possibilities that come to mind, though it will probably throw you off schedule.”

“I have a break coming up, but the best things in life should not be rushed.”

I leaned against the cart, and toward her.  “You have a name, sweetness?”

Her voice was a breathy tease.  “Elena.”  She leaned on her side of the cart.  The tip of her tongue appeared, wetting her full upper lip.  “What about you?”

“Caine.”

She stared at me, eyes flaring with realization.  “I know you!”

“I think I’d remember.”

“Deathwalker, right?”

My eyes narrowed.  “You got my name from the hotel register?”

“No, from here.”  She brushed a towel back, reaching for something. 

A flicker of thought caused one of my Beretta PX4s to appear in my right hand.  I didn’t let her see the semi-automatic—and wouldn’t—unless she pulled a weapon of her own. 

She produced a folded tabloid.  I watched carefully as she opened the paper.  Nothing dangerous lay hidden inside.  I sent my gun back to its satchel.  The tabloid was the
Dark Side News,
one of the underground newspapers put out by our kind; a rag devoted to gossip, dark trends, and often comical conspiracy theories. 

She spun the paper around and held it up, one finger stabbing a photo.  “This is you!”

I looked at the photo as her finger came away.  The story caption read:
Deathwalker fucks coven into submission
.  Yeah, that was me all right: sitting in the back of an ambulance, surrounded by EMTs, a ritual dagger jutting from my shoulder. 
That’ll teach me to fuck an aboriginal witch without disarming her first.  Bitch tried to feed me to Kurpannga, the hairless devil-dingo of the Dreamlands.
 

Infiltrating the EMTs was a pet project of the witches in L.A. who helped clean-up the city after major occult battles so humans could go back to blithe ignorance of the fragileness of their lives.   

Inaudible to others, my cock spoke to me (as he often does):
One of my best performances, ever
.

“It wasn’t actually a coven,” I said.  “More like an Australian dwarf and her demon familiar.”

“Were you scared?”

“Yeah, for a second; I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get

off a fourth time, but I managed.  Fortunately, the EMTs were able to hang out in the driveway while I finished up inside.”

She set the paper back on the cart and slanted me a look.  “They say you’re a demon lord.”

“By adoption, my father’s the Atlantean demon who runs the L.A. territory.” 
And me.

“So what are you?”

“That’s my question.  I can tell you’re not exactly human, but all I smell is—talc?”

She gave me a mysterious smile.  “So, what does that tell you?”

“Hell if I know.”

There was a double honk as my Shelby Mustang pulled into the parking lot, looking fierce in its black paintjob with gold-lightning jags for contrast.  I turned and scanned the body for signs of damage.  I saw none, which—for the sake of the girls—was a good thing.  Of course, I was still planning on flipping them over my knees for a well-deserved spanking.  Madison at least.  The car rolled up into a nearby parking spot.

The doors opened.  Madison slid out from behind the wheel.  I think she was the only one with a license.  Wearing a pastel green cowgirl hat that hid her mothy antennae, Grace emerged from the front passenger seat.  Onyx came out from the back, sheathed neck to foot in black.  His denim jeans were slashed out at the knees, flashing skin as he walked.  His tee-shirt had a picture of an anime girl wrapped in chains, wearing hot-pants and halter top, one eye dark, the other ablaze with blue fire.  She had some kind of massive rifle.  The logo said:
BLACK ROCK SHOOTER
.  His black sneakers were laced with acid-green strings.  Apparently, the girls had decided to dress him funny, not that he’d know that.

Elena came around the cart to stand beside me.  I shifted my head to watch her peripherally.  Her gaze locked onto the Mustang.  “Sweet ride,” she purred.

I nodded.  “I like it.”

“Want to take me for a ride?” she asked.

“My bed or yours?”

She turned and playfully smacked my arm.  The casual blow staggered me, telling me she possessed strength far above human levels.  Elena said, “Not on a first date.  I’m a lady.”

Grace came up and shoved a paper bag at me.  “Here, we thought you might be hungry.” 

I was.  I took the bag.  The bottom felt warm from the food inside.  They hadn’t taken my car too far to get fed.  That at least was considerate.

“And we put some gas in,” Madison added.

Onyx nodded, standing behind her.  “Five whole dollars.”

Grace glared at him for outing her cheapness.

He looked confused.  “What?”

“Never mind,” Grace grumbled.  She and Madison shifted their attention to Elena, taking her and the cart in with a measuring glance. 

Onyx smiled at her and waved.  “Hey!”

Elena smiled back, then turned her attention back to me.  “I really ought to finish up my shift.  How about I give you my number, and you give me a call later.  We can go out for drinks, or something.”

I took out my phone, and let her add her number to my contacts.  I put my phone away as she gave her cart a push, sending it rolling on to the next room in need of cleaning.  Grace waited until Elena was a distance away, then looked to me.  “She seems nice.  If you want some private time later we can always take the car and—”

“Die a bloody death?”  I smiled like it was a joke, but my eyes stayed cold and dead, making my words a promise.

“We didn’t want to take in the first place.”  Madison thumbed over her shoulder at Onyx.  “He made us.”