Lord of Hell (Alex Holden) (5 page)

I went down the block to check on people. Almost every home had damage either to the house itself or the garage. People were freaked out, asking each other if that was really an earthquake. Power was out in the whole neighborhood, but one guy had a battery-powered TV, and he set it up on a chair on his porch so others could come and watch. He had the volume cranked up so everyone could hear the news. The newscasters reported that it was definitely an earthquake, and they were still determining how strong it had been. Damage reports were coming in from all over the city and surrounding areas.

Downtown had been hit bad. The streets were full of rubble and the reporter said he couldn’t even get past the point where he was filming because the road was clogged with debris from a collapsed building. He went on about the high probability of deaths, of people trapped…

I shifted through the crowd, getting closer to the tiny screen, and squinted at the buildings behind the reporter. A month ago, it probably wouldn’t have been possible, but with how strong my powers had gotten, the visual was enough to get me there. I teleported, holding the image from the TV in my mind.

I popped in facing the buildings, and turned to face the camera. The cameraman leaned back from his tripod and stared. “What the…?”

I shrugged and ran up the street, away from the camera and the reporter. Again, I’d suck at being a superhero. I’d appeared in the shot, so I’d just teleported on live TV. That was something to worry about later, if at all. I had to get to the worst-hit buildings, and I had to help out.

The collapsed six-story apartment building stopped me cold. Down the street, I could see another damaged building, and another. No matter how fast I worked, it wouldn’t be enough. I couldn’t do this alone.

Police and firemen were already digging through the rubble. I didn’t see any cars, so they must have come part of the way on foot.

Mew-Mew!

He appeared on the street in front of me. I filled him in on what had happened.
Go help them out.
His power on Earth was limited, but he could still make himself seen and heard.
Find people trapped in there and point them out to the rescuers.

He hurried off and I pulled out my cell phone. Stefan picked up on the fourth ring, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Stefan, there’s been an earthquake in Evansville, Indiana. It’s bad. Some buildings collapsed downtown. People are hurt, trapped.” Somewhere nearby, someone was calling for help. “I need you to help. Are you at home? I can come get you.”

“Yeah, I’m home.” Stefan could teleport places he’d been to before, or places his raven went to, but he’d never been to Evansville.

I’d been to his house, and with a thought, I was outside his front door. I pounded on it and he answered. “Jeez, give me a second.”

“This is an emergency. A real fucking emergency.”

He gave me a firm look. “Alex, calm down. I need to put my shoes on.”

I took a deep breath while he pulled them on and tied them. Then I put my hand on his shoulder and took him to the city. We split up, him going down the block and me staying at the collapsed apartment building where Mew-Mew was quickly getting a lot of attention.

One unconscious person was pulled out by two firemen. The man who’d been calling for help was freed by a cop and a pair of citizens. Mew-Mew moved on and indicated another spot for them to dig. I went to help, shoving heavy debris aside until I could get the woman trapped there out.

I handed her off to a guy in a paramedic uniform. “How did you do that?” he asked, looking at what I’d moved out of the way to reach her.

“Magic,” I told him with a grin, and moved on to the next spot.

A few minutes later, I came across a terrified cat, huddled in an alley. “Are you hurt?”

The cat looked up at me, fur puffed out and eyes dilated. After a moment, he said, “What was that? The strange noise and all the shaking?”

“An earthquake. Are you hurt?” I repeated.

“No. Where is my person?” He looked around.

“Where do you live?” I worried his owner might be trapped in one of the damaged buildings. He led me next door, where the building was intact but showed signs of damage. Windows were cracked and shattered, broken glass littering the ground.

“I jumped out the window when it broke. I was so scared and I just wanted to get away.”

I picked him up and petted him reassuringly. Poor guy was trembling. “Which window?”

His fur settled. “I don’t remember. I have to smell them to find the right one.”

“Mikey? Mikey, where are you,” a woman called.

The cat lifted his head. “My person!”

I followed the voice and reunited the ecstatic owner with her shaken cat.

An aftershock caught everyone’s attention. “We need to get everyone out of these buildings. They could still collapse.” I looked at the woman. “Could you check on the other people in there? Knock on their doors; tell them they need to get out.”

“O…okay.” She held Mikey close against her chest.

More help arrived: police, paramedics, firefighters, regular people. I moved on to the next building. Even the ones that had little exterior damage could still have trapped people. Walls had collapsed; doors and shelves had fallen over. Every single building would need to be searched, and that would take precious time.

I needed more help. For just a moment, I was tempted to call up the demons and have them help, but there was no way I could trust them not to cause more harm than good. Emily, Elliot, even Colin didn’t have enough powers yet to be much more help than a regular human. Well, they’d still helped save the world. They could do
something.

I touched the black key in my pocket, wondering what else I could do, and stared at the destruction around me.

Chapter 6

Then I remembered something. The black feather.

I’d left it at home since I’d killed my father, not needing the reassurance anymore. I flashed home and grabbed it from the drawer in the nightstand, cupping it protectively in my hand. The Morrigan’s blessing. She’d told me not to use it for battles she couldn’t fight, meaning anything involving gods. But this was an earthquake. Using a battle goddess to help rescue earthquake victims was an odd idea, but I had to try.

Teleporting back, I stood by one of the less damaged buildings. With the feather in my hand, I thought,
Morrigan, you gave me a favor and I’m calling it in.

The flap of huge feathers made me open my eyes. She stood there, dressed in her usual battle gear. “What do you wish, Alex?”

“I want you to help with the rescue here.” I pointed at the damage all around us.

She blinked, looking around. “Rescue?”

“Yes. There was an earthquake. People are trapped and injured. I want you to help get them out.”

The Morrigan tilted her head. “Are you certain you want to use my blessing for this?”

“Yes. You said I could use it to call on your aid; well, this is the aid I want. Help them.”

“You are a strange one. Very well, I will help the humans.”

She turned and I said, “And get anyone else to help, if you can. We need to save them.”

“We will, O Defender of Earth.” Then she turned into a crow and was gone. I wasn’t sure if she was teasing me, complimenting me, or both.

I grabbed Elliot, Emily, and Colin from their homes and brought them to help. Every minute I didn’t spend digging someone out or bringing an injured person to a paramedic made my stomach clench with nervousness. But we still needed more help.

Not just people were trapped and in danger, but animals too. Then I had an idea. Animals could help, like Mew-Mew was. They had better senses and could lead rescue workers to trapped and injured people, like those specially trained dogs, only they didn’t have to be specially trained. I could just ask them to.

I found a cat in an alley, a stray, and asked him to help out. I told him to pass along the message that I wanted all cats working on the rescue. I came across a dog baying inside an apartment and let her out. Her owner was at work, and I recruited her for the cause. I looked for rats, but couldn’t find any. They must’ve felt the quake coming and cleared out.

Then I almost stumbled into a ghost.

A middle-aged woman, she was wandering near a bad car crash. She looked shell-shocked, her eyes unfocused. I went up and touched her arm. “Hello?”

In a flash, I got a glimpse of her life. Not as clearly as the soul I’d touched in Hell, this was more of an impression: guilt, happiness, anger, love. But even without the clarity, I knew she hadn’t done anything terrible. Nothing worthy of Hell.

Slowly, she focused on me. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, but you’re dead.”

“Dead?” She frowned. “What do you mean? I’m still here.”

I took a deep breath. “I think your body is in one of those cars.” Three of them had smashed together, and there was a small cluster of people over there. A few of them were on their cell phones, and many of them looked pale.

The woman laughed with a hint of hysteria. “That’s crazy.”

Without a word, I went over to the wreck. The closest car was empty, close enough to the curb that it might have been parked when it was hit. The other two cars had hit head-on. I checked the one in the middle, which was smashed between an SUV and the parked car. Sure enough, the woman’s body was crushed in the driver’s seat. The door was open and a man stood nearby, arguing with a woman who was on her phone. She was saying not to move the woman in the car, while he was saying they had to try something.

I felt the ghost behind me and stepped back. “I really am sorry.”

“Oh.” She leaned down for a better look, hands hovering near the body as if she couldn’t decide whether to touch it or not. “Oh, God.”

She stared for a moment longer, then backed away, shaking her head.

I took her arm again and tensed, waiting for another flash of insight. It didn’t happen. Good. That probably meant it was a one-shot deal. “I need your help. I need you to help search for trapped people. You can go through walls and debris, and you’ll be safe from aftershocks.”

The woman’s ghost stared at me.

“There are people trapped, hurt. You could save their lives.” I felt guilty about trying to recruit her when she was still processing the fact that she was dead, but we needed to find everyone as soon as possible.

She looked around at the damaged buildings and rubble. “What happened?”

“An earthquake. A bad one.”

“An earthquake? Here?”

“Yeah. Will you help?”

The woman looked around again and took a deep breath. Well, what passed for a deep breath—it was really just the motion without the actual breathing. “I’ll help.” Then she frowned. “If I’m dead, how come you can see me? Talk to me?”

“I’m special.” I didn’t have time to explain, and she’d brought up a good point. Shit. How could she help people when her ability to touch was limited at best, and no one else might be able to see her? “When you find someone, go stand outside the building, and concentrate as hard as you can on being heard and seen. Wave your hands, shout, do whatever you can to get someone’s attention. There are people all over, someone should notice you.”

Just then someone came running with a paramedic following her. They stopped by the wreck and the paramedic searched for a pulse on the woman’s body. Was there a chance they could revive her? Seeing how crushed she was and with the amount of time that had passed, I didn’t think so.

The woman’s ghost noticed what they were doing and turned her attention to them. I decided to leave her alone. She’d given me an idea. I closed my eyes and concentrated, searching for the closest cemetery. Locating one several blocks away, I brought out my wings and flew.

***

I mobilized all the ghosts in the graveyard and sent one as a messenger to the other cemeteries to ask them to help, too. Downtown had been hit the hardest, but the rest of the city also had wounded and trapped people. Three more aftershocks happened in the short time it took for me to get to the graveyard and back. One of them was bad, a short but violent shaking that made me wonder how many trapped people had just been crushed.

I couldn’t move fast enough. I couldn’t get help soon enough.

The ghosts struggled to get the attention of the living, but they did manage to flag down people eventually. I kept running around downtown, checking on the ghosts doing search and rescue. I tried to make sure that if they weren’t being noticed, at least I would see them, and I could grab a few people and pass along that someone was trapped or hurt and where they were.

Before nightfall, the most damaged part of downtown had been cleared. I was so tired I was almost asleep on my feet. Mew-Mew found me and told me to go home and get some sleep.
You’ve done as much as you can. Let the rescue workers take care of the rest.

People still might be trapped. I could help find them.

Alex.
He pawed at me.
We should go home.

I gave him a long look, and thinking about home made me ache for my bed.
Okay, but I want to check on my cult first.
I used the word with a hint of mocking, but it was a legitimate term. Cult didn’t always mean a group of crazy religious people; it used to mean the worshippers of a particular god: the cult of Isis, the cult of Dionysus. They were the cult of Alex.

They’d moved to a temporary shelter, a sturdier, newer community center that had withstood the quake with only slight damage. Cots and sleeping bags covered the floor of the gym. In the far corner, a little girl was crying.

“Alex!” Tim, Andre, and the others rushed over to me.

“Hey, how are you guys?”

“We’re fine. They don’t want us staying in the group home until an inspector can make sure it’s safe,” Andre said. “There’s a huge crack that goes all the way from the ground to the roof.”

“What about the girl that was hurt?” I didn’t see her with them and it made me nervous.

“She’s taking a shower,” Tim said. “She’s fine. Just a cut and a sore head. No concussion.”