Grimm Awakening (21 page)

“Shit.”

Mona laughed some more. “Looks like it’s lights out for you, darling.”

Jack supposed some part of his subconscious had known Mona would halt the descent of the cage to play this last round of mind games--hence his current precarious position. Now, however, his awareness of his impending death felt more real, more concrete.

“You look scared, Jack.” Mona’s voice was devoid now of that mocking sex kitten playfulness. “
Really
scared. Are you?”

Jack swallowed a lump in his throat. “Yes.”

“Should I come get you out of there?”

“If you don’t, it won’t matter soon, anyway.”

“I’ll ask you one more time--should I come get you?”

Jack felt defeated. What other way could he answer? “Yes.”

“Say please.”

Jack didn’t say anything.

He sensed movement above him. Something struck the top of the cage and rocked it, making him cry out. One of his hands was jolted free of the bar it’d been clinging to, but he managed to grab it again before disaster could strike. He looked up and saw Mona squatting atop the cage. She was grinning. She gripped the chain and gave the cage a hard shake. Jack screamed and held on with all his might (what was left of it). Mona tossed her head back and laughed heartily.

She rattled the cage one more time--though not as roughly--then looked at Jack. “Say please, Jack. Come on, you can do it. It’s just one teensy little word.”

Jack didn’t have to look too deeply within himself to realize it was the only thing to do. He surrendered. “Please.”

The high-pitched gasp that came from Mona then sounded almost orgasmic. “Oh, Jack!” She clapped her hands together. “You’ve made Mommy so happy!”

Mona grasped a bar at the top of the cage--not one Jack was clinging to--and began to pull at it. There was an unpleasant sound of rending metal as Mona ripped the bar loose and tossed it into the acid pool. She did the same with another bar. And another. Then she reached through the hole she’d created, gripped Jack by a wrist, and pulled him out of the cage. “Jack, have you ever wondered how it would feel to be Superman?”

Jack frowned, wondering what she could possibly mean by that, but the answer came a moment later when she tossed him high into the air. He was propelled with such force that he flew through the opening above. His flight trajectory resulted in a crash landing on the dungeon floor. The impact hurt like a motherfucker, but, he reflected, the pain beat dangling from the top of a cage over a pool of acid.

He turned his head in time to see Mona shimmying up the chain like Tarzan climbing a vine. When she reached a point where she was several feet above the level of the dungeon floor, she swung herself off the chain and hit the floor on her feet like a cat. She strolled over to Jack, gripped him by the collar of his shirt, and hauled him to his feet.

She clamped a strong hand around his jaw. “You’re such a fun playmate, Jack. I’d love to spend all day hurting you and fucking with your head. But it wouldn’t get me any closer to what I want to know, would it?”

Jack shook his head. “No. It wouldn’t.”

Mona released his jaw and patted his cheek. “Then do you want to guess why you’re still alive?”

Jack shrugged. “No idea, Mona.”

Her arms went around his back and she drew him into an embrace he didn’t bother fighting against. What good would that do? She curled a leg around him and laid her head on his shoulder. “Because I want you alive to watch your friends die.”

The comment jolted Jack. “Won’t happen. You’ll never take them alive.”

Mona nuzzled against him and made a purring sound into the crook of his neck. “You think so? Well, guess what? They’re here. In the Maverick. I received word of it while you were in the cage. They’ll be in custody within moments.”

“No.”

But even as he said it, some instinct told him Mona was telling the truth. He felt it in his bones and in his gut. He longed to twist out of Mona’s embrace and run for the door, maybe mount a daring, improbable rescue. But Mona sensed the disturbance within him and restrained him as easily as a kidnapper restrains a doomed toddler.

She made the purring sound again. “Isn’t it divine, darling? You’ll watch them die watch them
suffer
, and then you’ll spend all eternity as my slave, haunted by the awful memories of how completely you failed your friends.”

Her mouth opened on his neck and Jack felt her teeth push lightly at his flesh. The tip of her tongue lapped at a trickle of blood still seeping from one of the holes created by the collar studs.

Jack experienced loathing and shameful lust simultaneously. Alongside these feelings was the fear he felt for the safety of his friends. He didn’t want to let his father down. And he didn’t want to succumb to Mona, didn’t want to surrender to his basest instincts, but he suspected that part of it was already a lost cause.

He was right.

Mona ripped his shirt open, pulled it off his torso, and flung it aside. She did the same with his pants, upending him and depositing him painfully onto the floor. He watched her wriggle out of the catsuit. When she was shed of it, she stalked toward him like a panther closing on helpless prey. Then she was on him and he was inside her. A fresh explosion of shame and regret filled his head. He hated her. He’d kill the bitch given the chance and the means.

But for several blindingly pleasurable minutes none of that mattered.

The dungeon resounded with the sound of screams.

For once, though, they were screams of ecstasy rather than agony.

15.

Lucien did a quick rough count of the security guards in his field of vision. Maybe a dozen. With more coming from other angles.

“I see at least twelve.”

Andy, standing with his back to Lucien, said, “Maybe ten over here.”

Siegel said, “Hell if I know. A lot of the bastards.”

Lucien’s hand flexed over the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans, which, as a result of the change to hound-mode at the Red Room, were clinging to his body by a thread. “Think we can take them?”

Andy lit a cigarette as the first of the guards reached the edge of the surrounding crowd. He wedged it into his mouth and said, “Yeah.”

Siegel cleared his throat. “What about the innocent bystanders.”

Andy nodded. “Right. I’m thinking this is a hand-to-hand combat situation. Lucien, you may wanna go Big Dog on these guys.”

Lucien’s hand came away from the gun. He grinned. “Off the leash. At last.”

The thick crowd of gamblers knew by now that something exciting was about to happen, perhaps one of those big-time casino heists they’d seen movies about. As a result, they failed to turn and run screaming from the center of the action. Some of them were bound to get hurt. Which was too bad, but Lucien figured it was the price you paid for being that fucking stupid.

One bystander appeared even stupider than the rest. She was stumbling around wide-eyed, bumping into slot machines and mumbling about the flashing lights and the strange music from invisible musicians. But she had an excuse. Her name was Madeleine and she didn’t belong in this world. Lucien felt a degree of responsibility for her presence here, but all he could do now was hope she didn’t get herself killed.

Several guards had pushed through the crowd by now. Their weapons were drawn. This time the promise of impending violence acted on Lucien as effectively as the scent of spilled blood. The change came on quicker than at any time since leaving hell, without him having to will it. His hands and wrists thickened and sprouted fur. His forehead enlarged and his face elongated. Fangs as sharp as razors grew in his mouth. Streams of saliva rolled off the fangs, struck the green carpet at his feet, and sizzled. The rest of his body bulked up and the final strands of fabric holding his clothes together gave way. He raised his thickly muscled arms above his head and emitted a roar that finally induced a state of panic in the dumbstruck gamblers.

Madeleine screamed and fainted. One less thing to worry about.

Even the security guards looked terrified. One of them, a thin young man with acne scars, was struck so numb with shock that his gun slipped from his fingers and discharged when it hit the floor. Some more guards managed to get through the crowd just before the surge toward the exits began. Many others were caught up in the confusion and wound up trampled under the feet of scores of terrified patrons.

The skinny guard with the bad skin knelt and picked up his gun. He shakily aimed it at the strange trio. “Hands over your goddamn heads! Now!”

Andy chuckled. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

He flicked his half-smoked Marlboro at the nearest guard, who shrieked and jumped aside as if Andy had tossed a grenade at him.

“Lucien, buddy, let’s get this party started.”

Lucien was a dark blur as he surged toward the nearest group of guards. Several guns discharged at once, but no bullets found their targets. Siegel (who, with the rumpled fedora atop his head again, had also performed his version of the change) was already in motion, too. Lucien seized the skinny guard by the neck, lifted him into the air, and snapped his back over a knee. He tossed the twitching, screaming man aside and drove his clawed hands into the midsections of two more guards. Then his hands came out again and the guards’ intestines were spilling onto the floor. He swiped at another guard just as the man’s gun discharged. The bullet punched a hole through the middle of Lucien’s hand, but failed to impede its progress. He tore the man’s hand off at the wrist and the stump shot a bright arterial spray against Lucien’s chest. Another swipe of the injured hand send the man’s head flying deep into the casino--it landed with a thump at the center of a spinning roulette wheel.

During all this, Lucien heard occasional gunshots and meatier sounds, the impacts of fists on flesh. And the sound of limbs being snapped. Then an eruption of gunfire. Lucien spun the last guard in his vicinity around and tore his arm off. Blood from the stump sprayed a nearby bank of slot machines. Lucien saw that Andy’s hands held two liberated .38’s. When these were empty, Andy spun the weapons on their trigger guards and flung them into the faces of two approaching bad guys. While those men were on their way to the floor, Andy’s hands went into his jacket and came out with his own .45’s. He shot the fallen men where they lay, then turned and shot another man coming at him from the left. The casino cleared of innocent bystanders, Andy had forsaken hand-to-hand action to deal some lead. Siegel was doing the same.

Then the gunfire ceased and Lucien and his comrades stood alone in a room surrounded by carcasses and one unconscious woman. Lucien slipped back to human mode. When he noticed the other men frowning at him, it took him a moment to realize what the problem was.

He looked down, then looked into their now smirking faces. “No clothes. This never happened in hell. Special infernal fabric.”

They heard a groan and looked around to see Madeleine regaining consciousness. She sat up. And the first thing she noticed was Lucien’s state of undress. She stared at his groin and a wicked grin spread across her face. The second thing she noticed was all the dead people. Then she started screaming again.

Andy and Siegel glared at Lucien now.

Andy said, “Anyone’s eardrums not shattered yet? It’s your fault she’s here.”

“No, it’s her fault. She wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Lucien scanned the scattered bodies of the dead security guards for a suitable clothes donor. Prospects looked bleak until he spied a man with a snapped neck who was his approximate size. Lucien stripped the dead man’s khaki pants off his limp legs. He stepped into them and was pleased to find they were a comfortable fit. So were his shoes. He didn’t bother with a shirt, as he was certain he would have to go to hound mode again before all was said and done.

Madeleine was on her feet now, though she still looked a bit woozy. “I am sick unto death of you evil men discussing me as if I were not here. How was I to know you were sorcerers or that you’d bring me to this godforsaken place?”

Lucien said, “She’s got a point there, fellas.”

Andy addressed Madeleine directly for the first time since their arrival in the casino. “Okay, floozy, it’s important that you understand some things. Firstly, we are not sorcerers. Not all of us, anyway. Look around you. My friends and I are from an alternate version of your world. Our earth is far more technologically advanced than yours. Ninety percent of the things you take to be magic are instead evidence of our technology. The remaining ten percent will be actual magic. Up to speed yet?”

Madeleine just glared at him.

Siegel coughed. “We appear to have more company.”

Lucien sighed wearily. He should have known the hapless security guards would not be the Maverick’s lone defenders. Men clad in all-black getups identical to the ones worn by the men who’d attacked them at O’Scanlon’s were racing toward them from the far end of the casino. Bearing machetes and machine guns, they swarmed through the casino like a giant mass of black hornets bearing down on them.

Andy said, “Gosh. I’m not giving up or anything, but there’s a lot of them.”