Giving Him Hell: A Saturn's Daughter Novel (Saturn's Daughters Book 3) (33 page)

“I’m not a forensics scientist, Legrande,” I warned as I clambered down the ladder—this one wasn’t rusty. But the underground cavern stank of sulfur, and the heat was oppressive. My flashlight barely cut the gloom. In comparison, the culvert had been a bed of roses. I couldn’t see any bones. “Do you want me to bring cops this close to hell?”

Blue?
I called inside my head.
Know anything about people down here?

But Blue had wandered off on his own pursuits.

I had a posse with me. I shouldn’t need Blue. I was simply looking for someone to agree with me. Bad Tina. With a sigh, I followed the beam of Andre’s small but powerful flashlight.

He illuminated the slimy, dripping walls in ever-widening circles.

The ground sparkled a muddy pink and green. No cement floor here. Still seeing no bones. I looked up and flashed my own light along a cement ceiling to see how safe we were. They must have installed supports to hold the tunnel above the meteorite instead of smothering it. Which told me exactly what? That the meteorite destroyed concrete? Not good for the supports, if so.

I stepped off the ladder onto the sparkly mud. The crud stuck to my soles.

“I don’t think we want to be touching this stuff, boys,” I warned, climbing back to the ladder. I still couldn’t see what Max and Andre saw. I decided I liked it that way. I clung to the ladder and tried to think of a way to drag their asses back to safety.

“We can’t leave these bones down here,” Max protested, apparently studying the skeletons further down the dark tunnel. “They could be murder victims.” He fished around on the ground.

Ewww yuck. I’d call him a grave robber but I assumed he was looking for ID. Or dog tags. Military training dies hard. I looked away when his light flashed across something vaguely gray and bone-shaped.

“Or they could be victims of another of Acme’s industrial accidents. Or they killed each other after standing on violence-inducing green goo for too long. Get out of here before the two of you do the same.” I flashed my light back and forth over the ground so they could see what I saw.

“It’s just slime,” Max argued, obviously intrigued by the cavern and studying the layout after he pocketed what he could find from the skeletons.

Men! They climb mountains because they’re there. Testosterone-addled even in the face of clear danger. I was feeling lethal enough to turn valves and blow us all up. I wanted
solutions,
not more mysteries.

“What did you find?” I finally lowered myself to ask when he didn’t say.

“Can’t tell but it felt plastic. I’m thinking employee ID tags.” Max continued looking around.

Andre studied the conduits piercing the meteor. “Giant straws?” he suggested. The pumping engines hummed steadily above our heads, draining the
element
out of the ground.

The irregular surface of green and pink spread as far as the eye could see. The meteor could have crashed here back after the earth became a planet for all I knew. It was the ground we walked on and probably the support of all the Zone and the entire industrial park. There was no pushing that sucker anywhere. That was one whopper of a meteorite. If our alien was trapped inside, we could never reach him. We might reach hell faster.

Speaking of hell . . . The weird shriek struck again, far more piercing down here. It worked to a climax that nearly split my eardrums, thrummed the air, and seemed to be approaching at high speed.

I practically flew up the ladder. Andre and Max followed. I collapsed on the concrete floor and covered my ears. The Force flowed up and around us, as if the shriek had mass. Both Andre and Max dropped down over me, which probably ought to have broken my spine except they propped their weights up on their elbows. That they sought to protect me would be really sweet, but I knew my guys. They were overdosing on competitiveness.

I’d fret over all that hot male proximity except I couldn’t think through the shriek in my head. I twisted to see Andre and Max holding their ears but looking around with curiosity. No bats flapped.

The chanting above grew louder and more frantic. Drums pounded harder, and I was pretty sure I heard Lance and his crew adding their bellows.

“Not looking good, guys,” I murmured, still stupidly holding my ears. It wasn’t as if I was blocking out the din any better than my earplugs had. “Want to run, or see if I can send a meteorite to hell?”

“It’s just a
noise,
” literal Max protested. Really, he’d heard hell. He should know better.

“Always more fun to come,” Andre said cynically. “We’ve already had flood, so I’m betting on fire this time.”

“Let’s not get Biblical at a time like this. Get off me, both of you. A shriek can’t knock me down.” Although the pain of it was laying me flat. I still had the urge to crawl away.

Where was Milo?
Blue?
I called tentatively inside my head. No reply. The blue neon that had illuminated the tunnel when I entered it was fading.

Could I damn a shriek to hell? Not if it came from there in the first place.

When both Andre and Max hesitated over moving, I used my elbows to start wiggling out from under them. The shriek had reached such proportions that if the world wasn’t ending yet, I was sure it would shortly. A million and one voices had to synch to reach that hair-raising, chandelier-smashing level.

I was afraid the cement would start cracking from the sheer force of the sonic vibrations. How could I damn what I couldn’t see?

“Noisy down here, isn’t it?” a genial voice asked from the tunnel nearest the entrance.

How was I hearing anything? And then I realized the shriek was dying.

I glanced up and almost threw a
damn you to hell
right then and there.

Mike MacNeill had my cat in his arms, stroking Milo’s head and studying us humped over in agony on the floor. He didn’t even seem to notice the pain of the shriek. And what was Milo doing? Had he gone to fetch
MacNeill
the way he usually delivered Andre?

That wasn’t right. The shriek dying so abruptly wasn’t right.

And then I noticed the gun the ex-senator had hidden beneath my cat.

“What the hell are you doing down here?” Max/Dane asked, dragging himself upright and dusting himself off. Dane was taller than MacNeill, younger and stronger, but that was still Max’s father. It wasn’t as if he’d physically attack his old man. But what a man crazy enough to come down here would do was anyone’s guess. And that went for all three men.

The skeletons in the basement took on new meaning. Was my purpose in life to draw the evil-polluted crazies out of the Acme woodwork? It was certainly looking that way.

Andre and I remained on the floor. He grabbed my waist and hauled me behind him while he studied the situation. He still rubbed his ear with one hand.

“There are a lot of worried people above, wondering what you’re doing that’s causing all the racket. I told them I’d come get you, that we can work things out one way or another.” MacNeill looked directly at me. “The state is stalling on the eminent domain now that someone has raised a complaint.”

Oh goody. Julius had followed through despite everything. His connections were legion. And probably legendary. That explained MacNeill’s presence. The devil was in danger of losing a boatload of moolah and an opportunity to expand Acme hell.

Milo bared his teeth and struggled against the arms clutching him. He was big for a cat, but he’d been leading a soft life lately. MacNeill grabbed the scruff of his neck and wouldn’t let him go. One wrong move, and Milo was likely to expand into killer cat, but he seemed reluctant to do so for some reason. I heeded his caution.

The ground started to rumble again and the stench of sewer gas permeated the air. Andre glanced at the pressure gauges I’d been playing with and swore.

MacNeill didn’t blink an eyelash.
And that’s when I saw it
—the faintest outline of another image haloing him. That so wasn’t right.

I hastily scrambled to my feet. Andre followed a little more slowly, positioning himself to one side so he could watch all parties.

“Do you see what I see?” I asked Max, elbowing him, keeping an eye on that flickering . . . what did I call it? Spirit? Ghost?

“I see a lying no-account,” he muttered. “Want to hold a trial and ask him what he did with my mother’s money?”

He meant his real mother—the actual Vanderventer heir. Max hadn’t chosen to introduce me to his family while he was alive. Old story that. His mother had left the control of Acme to the man standing in front of us now.

MacNeill looked startled and stared at the Dane he could see. “I never did anything with Gloria’s money. How could I?”

But I knew we were talking about
Max’s
mother. So that’s where the hatred came from. Sort of got it.

That outer layer of darkness around MacNeill really had me worried.

I’d learned my lesson about turning people into amphibians. I didn’t want to make MacNeill invulnerable by visualizing him into something he could return from. But sending him to hell was a little drastic without a jury trial. I couldn’t even get furious enough yet to curse him. I was puzzled by that ghostly image.

I was seeing ghostly images. Auras.
I had a new superpower
.

Oh crap.

“Dammit, Saturn, couldn’t you just send me a nicely wrapped birthday gift?” I muttered under my breath. Andre looked startled, but Max/Dane and MacNeill were busy having a stare-off.

“Senator MacNeill,” I said with wonderful lawyerly unctuousness, “do you know anything of the bodies below us?”

I peered past Dane’s big shoulder to see Mikey’s facial expression reveal shock, but the hand with the gun lifted steadily and with purpose—guided by a ghostly helper? In another lifetime, I wouldn’t have noticed the dichotomy. These days, I was pretty attuned to the insane—like one hand not knowing what the other was doing.

“In the early days, right after the flood exposed the new element, we lost a few workers,” he growled. “Exploration is a dangerous business.”

Oh, right, yeah, too dangerous for anyone to retrieve the bodies. Still didn’t have conclusive proof that Mikey had killed anyone. And I couldn’t damn him for being an immoral ingrate or I’d have damned Andre long ago.

“Senator, have you ever been down in this tunnel before?” I prodded when he seemed too paralyzed to say more.

Max/Dane sent me an odd look but inched to one side, out of the path of my destruction. Smart boy.

Of course, he was finally playing hero by sidling closer to the demonically possessed man with the gun.

Demonically possessed
. I had to play fast with that notion. Sarah’s serial killer mother had said demons walked this earth, but how reliable is a sociopath? I was pretty sure Gloria hadn’t been normal. Max was able to inhabit Dane’s body, so why shouldn’t demons move into his father—who had spent years hanging out at Acme? Demons, evil, whatever. I’d only been working this shift a few months and still didn’t have a rule book.

So, if a demon had killed the men below, could I blame MacNeill and damn him? I wanted to.

“Why would I come down in this hole?” MacNeill asked with a puzzled expression. But he was squeezing my cat’s neck and fingering the trigger. “For all that matters, why are you down here?”

Why was Milo holding still for this? I’d seen him turn into a raging bobcat and stupidly try to take down a drunken killer. Milo was not ordinary. I had to believe he was still for a reason.

Was Milo keeping the demon image from completely taking over MacNeill? I was betting our lives on it.

As I stalled, the shriek returned at more piercing decibels—a siren call for minions? My mind was working overtime, so I had tuned out the noise. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I needed to damn the shriek to hell. What could it hurt?

Panic had worked to focus me before. In my mind, I built a warrant with every legal limitation I could summon, but a demon-infested ex-senator wasn’t precisely a situation from the law books.

After I’d worked out all the parameters of what I was about to do, I staggered, held my head, and tried to look weak as I leaned against the wall. The gun barrel followed me, even if the demon eyes were fixated on Max/Dane. Evil controlled the gun?

I wish the meteorite’s violent element will go away, letting Big Blue free,
I told Saturn Daddy, improvising wildly.
And if you give me big boobs instead, I’ll never play this game again,
I added, just because I was a lawyer and wanted all my bases covered.

Now, to the curse.

With the shriek piercing my skull, I called on all my Saturn willpower, shoved off the wall, and walked straight at MacNeill before Andre or Max could react. Polite visualizations weren’t justice this time, I was pretty sure. I had to throw the book at him.

“DAMN THE DEMONS BACK TO THE DEPTHS TO WHICH THEY BELONG AND CLOSE THE PORTAL TO HELL OVER THEM!” I shouted my carefully rehearsed curse over the shriek.

And then, just for good measure, I kicked MacNeill’s gun hand. Hard.

Milo yowled, did his blurry bigger-than-he-should-be act, and landed on MacNeill’s face as he stumbled backward.

The gun went off, naturally. The bullet hit the ceiling and cracks crumbled the concrete. The shrieks escalated in fury, shaking loose gray dust like flour through a rusty sieve. The earth quaked and the floor beneath us rolled and groaned. Our flashlight beams barely cut through the dust cloud.

Andre grabbed my arm before I could fully register it all. “Out!” he shouted.

Wise idea, except my brain kept getting in the way. Wielding my Saturn power tended to leave me a wee bit confused and physically drained. I’d always used my power before in a red rage that left me in a state of shock. This time was different. I was still shaking—rightfully so given that the floor was rolling like a wave. But this time—I
felt
stronger, as if I really was a powerful person and not the meek mouse I’d always assumed.

I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. Power was dangerous unless wielded wisely. Had I done the right thing? I had to see results to know.