Labyrinth of Stars (A Hunter Kiss Novel) (8 page)

“Hey,” I said, mouth so dry I could barely form the word. I glimpsed movement at the corner of my eye: Grant’s feet, and the bottom of his cane. His hand came down, and I grabbed it, hard.

He pulled me up into his arms. His breath was warm on my neck, and I kissed his throat. His skin tasted hot, feverish.

“We’re in Taiwan,” he said, pulling away. “Taipei. Been here before when I was young.”

I looked around. We were standing inside an unlit street so narrow I could have stretched out my arms and laid my palms flat against each opposing wall. Electric wires and other thick cables hung above our heads, along with laundry and birdcages. Raw and Aaz clung to the walls, claws dug in and hanging upside down. Both of them reached into the shadows and pulled out hand grenades. They yanked out the pins, and shoved the live explosives into their mouths.

Grant blew out his breath and looked away. “We better get moving.”

I touched Zee’s head. “We need Jack.”

But the little demon didn’t move, except to lean in and press his ear against my stomach. A tremor passed through him, and in moments Raw and Aaz gathered close, also leaning in for a hard, close embrace. I wrapped my arms around them, sharing their weak relief, and reverence. My heart, thick in my throat. Dek and Mal licked my ears, and Grant slid his hands against them into my hair. His brow pressed to mine.

“We’re okay,” I whispered.

“Yes,” Zee murmured, against my belly. “Her dreams still sing.”

Grant pulled me closer. I leaned against him, vision swelling in a slow burn that blurred the shadows with tears. Zee reached out and covered our joined hands, those claws soft as silk. Small sighs filled my hair.

“Family,” Zee rasped. “Strong as, deep as.”

“Family,” Grant echoed softly.

“Mine,” I said, but it didn’t make me feel better.

I
T
was a bad night to be out. Hot, wet, with mountain-kissed thunderclouds and humid winds gathered thick over a red-light market slum in the heart of Taipei. We were far from home.

Tourists spilled into the narrow road. Grant and I skirted the crowd, listening to gasps and camera clicks, and uneasy laughter. My heart tightened into a painful knot when I peered around them and saw a little girl, no older than eight or nine, grab a cobra from its tank and slip a wire noose over its head.

No fear on her face. Just focus: cold, unrelenting. Little hands pulled hard on the cobra’s writhing tail—straightening that long, muscular body with an ease that would have been only slightly less disturbing if she hadn’t been dressed like a ballerina, wrapped in a ratty pink tutu with bows in her braided hair.

A middle-aged man stood beside her. He held a curved blade, fake rubies glittering up and down the hilt. No costume. Just bloodstains on his pants and a smile on his face as he gazed at the gathered crowd.

Demon. Possessed by one, at any rate. I saw the shadow thick as ash above his head, flecks of darkness snowing down upon his shoulders.

His gaze found mine. His smile slipped. I made a gun sign with my hand and pointed it at his face. Grant shook his head, and the demon took a step back, placing himself behind the child.

Grant and I shared a quick look but kept walking. We weren’t here for him, or any girls who weren’t our own.

We moved fast. Grant’s breathing became labored though his pace didn’t slow. His color wasn’t good—too pale, but with a flush high in his cheeks that looked like a fever. I wasn’t feeling well, either. Sweat poured down my back, between my breasts. So humid it was difficult to breathe though I’d never had a problem before with heat. My body felt hollow, weak, heart pounding so hard. I blamed it on the near miscarriage, but there was a part of me—very small—that kept seeing that Mahati demon vomiting to death: blood and bile staining the snow. I couldn’t shake the dread.

I touched the sinuous bodies coiled tight around my throat. Scales soft, warm. Dek and Mal loosened their holds on me, making it easier to breathe. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t worried about anyone seeing them on my shoulders. We were past that now. It was all too late.

Zee slid through the shadows beside me, nothing but a sliver, a glimpse, a glint of red eyes. Raw and Aaz glided above the street, leaping between the neon lights that covered storefront windows and the signs hanging vertically from cracked, aging buildings. I felt them, close as my skin, close as my heart, racing quick. Little kings. Little family.

Tourists thinned. So did the light. More locals now, men dressed in house slippers and limp white tanks and slacks; several teen girls in miniskirts, smoking cigarettes and drinking bubble tea, giving us bored glances. Just more foreigners, overdressed for the heat.

Two old women stepped into our path: short, compact, hard lines etched into their sharp chins and cheeks. Small feral eyes, glittering. Hands flashed; for a moment I thought they held knives or balls of light. Their auras were full of demonic shadows. More of the possessed.

My first instinct was to kill them. Not the human hosts but the demons inside. My entire body tensed with the need—and I had to tell myself, had to remember, that things were different now. We were all on the same side. More or less.

The demons gave us wary looks and waved the flashlights they held, pointing the beams at a narrow metal door squeezed inside an alcove barely wide enough for my shoulders.

“He’s on the top floor,” one of them said with distaste, as though the words were shit in her mouth. Or maybe being forced to help us made her ill. I didn’t like it, either. Seemed against the natural order of things.

“You’ve been watching him?” Grant asked.

“Blood Mama made us, all these months,” replied the possessed woman, while her friend looked past us and gave some tourists a toothless grin. “The Wolf can’t be trusted.”

I started to walk past her, and she stopped me. “Our mother says you didn’t listen.”

“Listen?” I thought of that waitress in Texas. “I listened fine. The message just wasn’t worth shit.”

The old woman stepped forward, deliberately ignoring Grant. “You should have let your baby die and made another, with a different father.
That
was what you should have heard in her message. Your attachment to the one in your belly will fuck us all.”

I grabbed her throat, and the woman squawked like a flattened chicken. The tourists who were passing us—a slight, elderly white woman, and her equally elderly black husband—gave us startled looks and kept on walking, fast. The demon’s friend also backed away—right into Raw, who appeared from the shadows with a snarl.

“I’m going to kill you,” I told her.

“Let me do it,” Grant said.

I glanced at him, an unpleasant thrill in my gut. His eyes were so cold, so grim, I didn’t recognize him. Truly, for a moment, it was as if another man had stepped into my husband’s place. Even his face looked different: thinner, longer, lost in so many shadows he seemed to exist between
here
and
there
.

He looks like a demon,
I thought.

Until, suddenly, he was my husband again. But that was almost as frightening.

The possessed woman’s eyes bulged; she clawed at my hand. Zee flowed from the darkness and grabbed her leg. She went totally, completely still.

“Little light is our light,” he whispered. “Cut her, we cut you. Cut you
all
dead.”

“Traitors,” she rasped. “False Kings. You reaped worlds and would lose this one to a child and a Lightbringer.”

Grant made a sharp, slicing sound with his tongue—I felt it scrape against my skin like a razor blade. Both the possessed women stiffened, dark auras tearing straight up—invisible hands ripping them from their stolen bodies. I imagined a tearing sound—but that was just the women sucking in their breath through their teeth, inhaling and inhaling, standing on their toes, rising as high as their stout, stolen bodies would take them. Backs arched. Bones cracked.

My husband spoke again, and those demon auras snapped free of their hosts. Zee leapt up, grabbing one of them. Raw took the other, holding that struggling wisp in his fist. He grinned, sharp teeth absolutely hideous—and stuffed the demon in his mouth. Zee did the same, swallowing with grim pleasure.

I had already released the human woman’s throat, but I touched her again, this time to hold her up as her knees buckled. Grant grabbed her companion, but he only had one hand free and she half fell to the sidewalk with a grunt. Zee and Raw were already gone, lost into the shadows.

Demons, parasites. For years, I’d called the hosts of these things
zombies
. Humans with weak minds, possessed by demons who fed on their pain and the pain they caused others. An old demon could possess absolutely. A weak demon was just a hitchhiker, influencing from the shadows of the unconscious. But either way, the host was always screwed. I’d known men and women forced to commit terrible crimes against their wills—and after an exorcism have no memory of it. No memory, but forced to live with the consequences, forever.

Both women were touching their heads, babbling to each other in Chinese. I didn’t understand a word, but Grant began humming, a soft melody that skimmed across my skin like a feather. The women calmed, staring blankly at each other.

I pulled Grant toward the apartment-building door. His hand was clammy. I said, “That wasn’t like you.”

“Does it matter?” he asked tightly.

I forced him to look at me. “You’re not a killer.”

He paled but stayed silent. I didn’t know what else to say except take his hand. I kissed the back of it, briefly pressing his palm against my cheek. Willing him to feel my concern.

I’m changing,
whispered his voice inside my mind.

I caressed our bond, savoring the light and heat of it.
You’re a father whose daughter is being threatened.

Grant drew in a sharp, pained breath.
It’s more than that.

And then, carefully, gently, he pulled his hand from mine.

We went inside, blinking at the dim, buzzing fluorescent lights, which cast the world in a sick greenish gray. I heard televisions, shouts in Chinese, but tuned it all out, listening to my heart pound as I ran up the stairs two steps at a time.

Grant couldn’t keep up, but said, “Go on.”

So I did. Zee uncoiled from the shadows, dropping on all fours to race ahead of me. His claws left deep gouge marks in the stairs. He looked over his shoulder, hair spikes flexing with agitation.

“Maxine,” he rasped.

“Find Jack,” I said. “I’ve got Dek and Mal.”

But Zee did not leave me. Instead, he moved closer, so close I could reach out and touch him as I ran up the stairs; and I did, my palm skimming his sharp hair and the tips of the spikes jutting from his back. Comforting, having him near. I needed the reminder I was not alone. Even having Grant with me wasn’t reassurance enough.

We reached the top floor. No one was in the hall. I heard men speaking Chinese behind closed doors, a dog whining. My boots scuffed the stained tiles. I smelled hot oil, garlic, and something rotten, like the lingering vapor from a dirty toilet.

We stopped at the second-to-last apartment. Door was already cracked open, Aaz just on the other side, peering out at us. His eyes were huge, sharp ears pressed flat against his skull. He clutched a half-eaten teddy bear. Not a good sign. My heart dropped, and I pushed inside.

It was night; I expected darkness. But the apartment I found myself in felt worse than dark. I could taste the desolation, sickly sweet: plates of rotting food on the table, the buzz of flies, the oppressive ovenlike air so thick I could have been pushing through solid matter. I waded into that apartment, stomach churning, letting my eyes adjust to the shadows and faint neon light streaming through slivers in the blinds.

“Jack,” I said, and then louder:
“Jack.”

Zee fell into a shadow—slipping in and out of this world through the gloom—and then reappeared on the other side of the room, beckoning me with a flash of his long claws. I followed, Aaz staying close, chewing on his teddy bear’s ear. I skirted books, paintings; a tall vase that I nudged with my shoulder and almost knocked over.

A smell hit me: more rot, but this time of the living; and I saw the rounded curve of a back, so hunched and still that at first I thought it was another piece of furniture. But no, there was an arm, pale and thick with muscle; and I heard, I felt, a slow exhalation. I took a step closer, and choked. The air was rancid with filth. My shoes stuck to the floor.

“Meddling Man,” Zee whispered.

I moved sideways and found the little demon crouched on top of a small table, his claws digging hard into the wood. All the spikes on his head flexed in agitation. Raw was there with him, and Aaz made a small, distressed sound. Dek and Mal coiled tighter around my throat.

A crystal skull was on the table.

It didn’t resemble anything human. Wide cranium, protruding crests at the cheeks. Thick jaw, filled with teeth as sharp as dagger points, like a piranha’s mouth. I could see the lines of that thing, all those spectral curves, as if a light were in my eyes, or its eyes, and it made me dizzy for a moment. I touched my stomach again, which felt warm. My right hand tingled, the armor encasing my skin coming alive.

Zee and the boys stared at the skull. If they destroyed it right now, I would not be surprised. That . . . thing . . . and twelve other similar artifacts were responsible for channeling the power that had been used to imprison my five little demons upon the body of my ancestor—and bind thousands of demons more into a prison outside this world.

My grandfather had been one of the prison-makers.

I watched the old man. It had been months. I barely recognized him. For a moment, I wondered if he’d found a new body to inhabit.

But I looked longer, harder, and all those rough edges were the same: cheekbones, nose, that broad, lined brow. His face was barely visible behind his matted beard and crusty shreds of silver hair. His shirt was rotting off him, filled with holes and stained yellow with sweat; and his boxer shorts were hideously filthy. He smelled like sewage. Made my skin crawl. Just standing there, breathing the same air: lethal.

He sat so still, eyes open, unblinking: staring at the crystal skull. I didn’t want to imagine how long he’d been like that. Long enough, maybe, to kill a normal human. His lips were crusted with blood.

Grant entered the room behind me. “Oh, my God.”

I ignored him, stepping in front of my grandfather—blocking his view of the skull.

“Jack,” I said.

Nothing. For a long moment I was sure he wouldn’t stir, that whatever had captured him would continue holding his spirit and flesh. He was in a coma, he was paralyzed, he was already gone from that body.

But just as I was about to call down Zee, the skin around his eye twitched. So did his hand, resting on his knee. I held my breath, waiting. I held my breath, so I wouldn’t vomit. Sweat rolled down my back. I thought about home and wanted to reach past the filth and shake my grandfather awake.