Demon Squad 7: Exit Wounds (7 page)

“You’re not helping, Frank.” Karra pushed me out of the way just like Katon had earlier. “Tell us where the others went.”

“I don’t know,” she answered with a shrug. “They trekked across Tenebrae and slipped through another rift before we could see how they summoned it.”

“And you thought we would do the same?”

“Are you not with the others?”

This circle jerk wasn’t satisfying anyone. “Who the hell are these others you keep yapping about?”

“The ones who came through the sky.”

Karra put her free hand on her hip and glared at the woman on her knees. “Look, I’m losing my patience. This roundabout effort to tell us as little as possible is going to get you gutted. Now start giving us something that makes sense.”

Mia met Karra’s stare for a moment, but there was no way she could hold out against the twin furies that seared her soul. I know because it usually takes me about fifteen seconds to cave. Mia was an inspiration, though. It took her all of a minute.

She sighed. “We felt the aperture open, its energies alerting all of Tenebrae, but the guardians appeared and chased you away before we could see how you operated the passageway.”

“Are you talking about the dragons?” I asked, since it was clear we weren’t getting anywhere with the portal business.

The green woman looked at me, confusion plastered across her face.

“The big winged things with teeth?” Karra corrected, getting a nod from Mia.

“Yes. They are the guardians of Tenebrae.”

Rahim glanced about the swarm of pink trees, gesturing to the desolate surroundings with his remaining hand. “What exactly do they guard?”

“Us.”

“Uh, and why is that?” I asked.

“To keep us here.”

“In a place where no one knows how to leave?” I tried to shake the stupid off. “Am the only one who’s confused?”

“We are so not getting anywhere,” Karra groused, grabbing the woman by the scruff of her neck and pulling her to her feet. “You said the others are gone, right? Which way did they go? Tell me when we’re facing the right direction.”

Karra spun the woman around slowly until Mia called out. We all glanced off that way, pretty much realizing at the same time that she was pointing us in the exact same direction we had already been going: straight toward the mountain.

“That was helpful,” I muttered while Karra suggested pointedly that Mia lead the way after she tied a line of material to the woman’s hands, effectively putting her on a leash.

The green woman started off, and we were on our way…again…exactly like we had been before we captured our illustrious guide.

Good thing we weren’t paying her.

Seven

They say life is about the journey, and not the destination.

Well, fuck those guys! After about two long-assed hours of walking through the maze of trees, the sun mostly blocked from view by weird, purple leaves, I was getting damn sick of the journey. And screw all that believing stuff, Steve Perry. I’ll stop believing if I damn well please.

“Seriously, how in the hell do you have any idea where you’re going in this Godforsaken forest of pink doom?”

Mia grinned, pointing at the nearest tree. “All of the trunks lean in the same direction.”

I followed her finger and sure enough, they did. While it wasn’t overtly obvious, the moment Mia mentioned it I could see exactly what she was talking about. All of the trees had a slight slope to their trunks that seemed to angle the same way.

“Where do they lead?”

“Toward the
Sanctuarium Custodes
, of course.”

“Of course.” My Latin was pretty rusty, but so was hers, apparently, not that I had any clue as to why she would speak Latin in the first place. Had to be a trick of whatever power allowed her to speak English. “The Sanctuary of the Guardians. How…creative.”

She shrugged. “It is what our ancestors called it, so who are we to question?”

“Your ancestors?” Rahim asked, showing signs of life for the first time in a while as he drew closer. “Were you not trapped here by God?”

She spit. “We have no gods but the beasts,” Mia said, pointing toward the mountain, the conviction in her voice chilling, “and they hold their summit unless summoned by the rifts.”

I didn’t want to disabuse her of her delusions, you know, having only just had a chat with the Man Not Quite Upstairs Anymore a few months back. “Just how long have you been here?”

“My entire life.”

The group’s paced slowed at that.

“You were born here?” Karra asked.

Mia nodded. “As were my parents, and theirs before, and my grandparents, and on down the line for as long as history tells us.”

That was some heady shit. What had been a prison for God’s fuckups had become a breeding ground for generations of…what exactly? Cast aside because they didn’t fit His plans, what the hell were these beings now, besides institutionalized?

“What could God have possibly wanted with a place like this?”

Rahim asked the question that was next on my mind. What indeed? There certainly weren’t any answers forthcoming. Maybe the next time I ran into Him, I’d ask.

Mia went silent, trudging through the woods with the rest of us at her back. She either reflected on her life or realized that’s what we were doing, and left us to it in peace. Regardless, the revelation that she had been born in this desolate prison world was a conversation killer. Even Chatterbox, who’d been humming a variety of power metal anthems for our walk, went quiet.

We walked along for another hour like that, no one speaking or doing anything that might break the hush that settled over us. It wasn’t until we pushed our way through a wall of foliage and stumbled into a small clearing that any semblance of life returned.

It came in the form of a gasp.

Mia’s steps ground to a halt. Her head swiveled toward the heavens, alabaster eyes turned to swimming pools in her face. “How long was I unconscious?”

“What is…it?” My own eyes followed her gaze, my question seeming rather idiotic as I saw exactly what had brought her to a halt.

Where the expansive and bright sky had been when we entered the Hello Kitty Woods was now replaced by an inky blackness that roiled as if it were an ocean of tar. An army of shadows devoured each other above, the cheery light fading beneath the inexorable tide. Judging by how fast the darkness moved, it wouldn’t be long before it swallowed the entire sky, and that couldn’t be good.

“We need to find cover.” Mia’s voice was brittle with fear. “Now! Night comes,” she said, tugging at the makeshift leash tying her to Karra.

“Where?” Katon pressed, not bothering to question the green woman’s statement. There was no mistaking the honesty of her terror.

Mia darted off into the trees without waiting to see if the rest of us followed.

We did, of course. When a local freaks the fuck out, the smart move is just to follow along and worry about what’s going on later.

Mia darted between the trees, pulling hard at her leash to force Karra to keep pace. Like a dog looking for the right spot to piss, she circled each trunk, running her hands along their bark only to abandon them seconds later with a dissatisfied growl. She went on and on, from tree to tree, her frantic panic growing with every passing second.

“Tell us what we’re looking for so we can help,” Katon said, but the green woman pushed on without a word.

At last, her eyes glimmered as she came upon a nondescript trunk, its only difference being that it was slightly narrower than surrounding giants and bore a trio of pale scratches across its face. Mia dropped to her knees and ran her hands through the dark dirt, fingers flitting along and stirring up piles of soil and humus. At last she cried out in triumph, a mechanical
click
following her pronouncement.

“In here,” she said, getting to her feet.

To my amazement, a huge chunk of the tree trunk rose with her, peeling away from the whole with a
creak
. She grunted under its weight and I rushed to help, peering into the darkness she revealed. Katon, sword drawn, was the first to slip inside. A ladder woven from tree roots greeted us just inside, its length falling into a deep well of darkness.

“Wait here.” The enforcer wormed down the ladder without hesitation and faded into the shadows.

The huff of quick, shallow breaths was the only sound to be heard while we waited. It seemed forever before Katon finally called up to us.

“Come down, it’s safe.”

Rala was first down the ladder, passing me Chatterbox as she went. He hummed the theme to Jaws as Veronica went behind the alien, so I tossed him into the hole after them. There were a few muttered curses as he bounced off whoever was in the way, followed by a meaty thump.

“Meeeedddddiiiicccccc! Maaaaannnnn dooooowwwwwnnnnn!”

His shout lasted a few seconds before someone clamped their hand over his mouth and shut him up.

Next went Mia, whose face showed just how relieved she was to be going. If this was some sort of trap, she was the best actress I’d ever seen. She was like the love child of Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman, only green.

I chased Karra down the ladder and motioned for Rahim to go after her. Both gave me ugly looks as if I’d farted in an elevator and waved them in, but they went without complaining. I stepped in after them, letting the trunk-door close behind me. It killed the last of the light and dumped us all into an early midnight with a sullen
thump
. Fortunately, my vampy-sight kicked in and the hollowed out core of the tree came into sharp relief.

I hit the bottom, and turned to see a cozy, underground cavern that had been dug painstakingly out of the soft dirt and reinforced with thick branches, which formed a sloping roof of natural rafters. At the top of the far end of the twenty by twenty foot foxhole was a mesh of tree limbs and leaves, all woven into a thick netting that swayed slightly in the breeze. Mia kept her distance from it, and the others picked up on that, doing the same, the group huddled close against the nearby wall.

“What’s out that way,” I whispered.

Mia stared at the woven mass a moment before answering in an even quieter voice. “Our escape, should we need it.”

“What are we hiding from?” Rahim asked, moving closer to the alien woman so they could speak without their voices carrying.

“The night,” she answered, slipping right back into her terse narrative that told us nothing.

“A little more detail would be nice.”

She shook her head and pointed to the mesh. “Take a look for yourself, but do it silently lest you bring ruin upon us all.”

Everyone looked to me as if I’d already screwed up, so I just raised my hands in surrender and crept to the netting without replying and pressed my face gently against the mass of foliage. I regretted my curiosity pretty much instantly.

The already gloomy forest had become even bleaker, the pink trunks barely visible in the shroud of darkness that had settled over. I could barely see ten yards ahead of where we hid, my vision wavering as it tried in vain to sort the details buried in shadow. It was only then, while I was pushing my senses to their fullest, that I realized it wasn’t what I could see that bothered me, but what I could hear.

Unlike earlier, the hush of the forest so prevalent as to be deafening, there was true noise battering my ears. Shuffling feet scraped the ground raw, stirring up the sour stench of moist earth. Roughened grunts and growls seeped into the air, growing louder and more guttural with each passing second. If I’d needed to breathe, I would have held onto the air in my lungs right then in fear of what the sound might summon.

Dark shapes flitted past the cracks in the netting, giving me no opportunity to define them, save for that they traveled in herds. Heavy steps filed by while I strained to spy them clearly to no avail. It was like trying to watch a skin flick in a snowstorm. Whatever the creatures were, they had come out of nowhere and filled the night the moment it fell. I could smell the stink of them, raw, unbathed flesh filling my nostrils with disgust. I glanced behind me to see the others were just as offended, the whole lot of them covering their noses and mouths.

Katon came to stand alongside me. He pressed his eye to a crack, the point of his sword just inches away should he need it. I hoped he wouldn’t.

I gave him a sideways glance, which he immediately translated, providing me with a shrug in response. He couldn’t see what was out there any better than I could. The look on his face told me he hated that realization more than even I did.

We hovered there silently for a long time as the creatures outside shuffled by, the cluster of them finally thinning enough for us to see the end of their group before they finally ambled out of sight.

I looked back to Mia. “Is that—”

She cut me short with a terrified hiss, the sound so low in her throat as to be almost silent. Her finger on her lips, she shook her head, and made it clear she would say no more. Katon and I turned back to our watch with trepidation. There was nothing worse than not knowing what you were up against. Your own imagination turns against you and fills in details even the worst of enemies would have a hard time comparing to. My mind was twisting itself in knots. Given all I’ve encountered in life, my brain had way more than enough fucked up shit to conjure up. And lo and behold, it outdid itself.

An eerie moan cut through the night and set my undead skin to crawling. Unconsciously, I inched back from the netting, but my gaze wouldn’t let go of the image that appeared outside of our hiding place. And while I might have imagined it, I felt Hobbs’ heart sputter.

Katon eased closer to the netting, and I could see the muscles of his back tensing, which only made me more nervous. If he could see what was out there, too, then it wasn’t just me playing make believe. It really was there.

“
A Devourer,
” I’d whispered without even realizing it.

Incandescent purple eyes glowed in the darkness, its sweeping gaze taking in the forest with a rabid insistence. It floated above the ground just as I remembered the last one I’d seen doing. The one that ate me and separated my soul from Azrael’s. Its skeletal hands clawed at the air, bones
creaking
like an aging boat at sea. Just like the other, a ratty black cloak—which I believed was simply a manifestation of its inner decay—trailed out behind it. A large hood covered its head save for the glimmer of its eyes, but it did nothing to hide its intent. It was seeking prey, and I knew from experience that its three mouths gnashed jagged teeth together as it sought a victim to devour. Its breath was a wisp of foulness a shade darker than the night.