Red Right Hand (15 page)

“I would expect nothing less from you, Charlotte Tristan Moore.” He smiled. “Nothing less indeed.”

“Stop using my full name.”

Daniel came back holding a four-foot section of IV pole in his hands. His color had improved, and his movements were steadier. He wasn't back to normal, but he looked better.

His eyes slid from me to the Man in Black and back to me. “What were you two talking about?”

The Man in Black didn't say anything.

“Strategy,” I said.

“We have a plan?”

“Not as such. Stay close, and be careful.”

He hefted the steel pole, the look on his face determined, brows drawn and his lips set in a hard line. “I'll be right here beside you.”

“I can take care of myself. You stay near your Master.”

He shook his head, making his shaggy bangs sweep back and forth over his intense green eyes. “
He
can take care of himself. I'll watch your back.”

He would get himself killed worrying about me. I needed him to stay close to the Man in Black. I didn't like it, but it was his best chance for surviving whatever came next.

And something
was
coming.

Mason had stopped cutting himself and was now gesturing wildly, gore covered hands jerking through the air. The blood from his body lifted, suspended in front of him. It swirled and congealed into a ball of liquid crimson. The air inside his circle of protection crackled with magick that I could now feel like a pulse against my skin.

We didn't have long.

I pushed Daniel, making him step sideways. “Stay. With. Him.”

Before he could protest again, the air around Mason split like a lightning strike, and a rush of magick spilled out into the room.

The spell buzzed in my eyes, and I watched it arc from the ball of blood in front of Mason. It sizzled into the bodies on the beds around the room. They began to thrash, plastic and metal restraints banging against bedrails in a cacophony. Banging and clanging, crashing metal on metal. The beds jittered, skewing sideways like slow-motion car wrecks. The air tasted metallic and sour on the back of my tongue.

I leaned toward Daniel, near shouting over the noise. “Did you see that?”

His eyes were wide. “I see the octopenis man with no clothes and the spinning disco ball of blood. Is that what you're talking about?”

“He does not have the Sight, Acolyte. He only sees the natural.” The Man in Black's voice rang clear over the din, more inside my head than out. “Prepare yourself. The moment is almost at hand.”

The bodies stopped thrashing as if a plug had been pulled.

An avalanche of silence fell, pulling at my eardrums like a vacuum after the assault of noise a second ago. Then a sound I had never heard before began to build. It was a … my mind groped for the right word … a
groaning.
The sound of something being pulled to the breaking point. The sound of birthing. It made me look at the people in the beds. They weren't moving, but their stomachs were. Their skin pulsed, undulating like air bladders being inflated and deflated. They expanded, stretching, ripping free of the clothing over them. Each one swelled, road-mapped with throbbing dark blue veins. Every palpitation drew another groan from the body it ripped through, a horrible sound that pulsed through the room, crashing into my mind like an ocean tide. All the patients' stomachs were now the size of young children crouching over their bodies.

Mason whipped his hands apart and stepped through the ball of enchanted blood. It broke like a bubble, splattering across the tile floor. He screamed across the ward at us. “Now you will see the coming of the glory of Yar Shogura. Bask in his presence, join his unholy flesh, and know the peace of consumption!”

The stomachs ruptured in a shower of gore that rained across the room.

 

24

I
TURNED AWAY
as hot ichor splattered down on me. It hit like hailstones, striking hard and drenching me from head to toe. My eyes were closed against it, but I sputtered as it ran down my face. I could hear sizzling where it fell on the flame of the firebrand in my hand. I'd stopped concentrating, and the flame had died down to merely a lick of fire, but it still burned, the ichor crackling and popping against it.

It smelled foul: a sour vegetation stink mixed with the meaty scent of decomposition. It clogged my nostrils, shutting them tight. Desperately I wiped my face, trying to clear the goo away.

The sight I opened my eyes to made me forget about the stench.

The tumors had burst free from their belly-prisons and were crawling across the floor.

They stumped along, pulling themselves in trails toward Mason. Some rolled, some lurched, some
wriggled, but all of them moved. They were different shapes, different sizes. Here, one with tiny claw-tipped limbs hooked the tile and dragged itself forward. There, one with a row of jagged teeth swirling through its discolored flesh buzzed and hopped. Another trailed a length of hair behind it that spread over the floor like a ratty blanket.

As they met in front of Mason they bumped together, quivering as they rubbed against one another. Two tumors rose, pressing hard against each other until their membranes slipped, allowing the cancerous flesh of one to run and pour into the other. Others joined, metastasizing, growing into a monstrosity. The conjoined masses made a wall of tumorous flesh that throbbed and glistened. The pieces I had seen in the tumors slid through the mass of diseased flesh, swimming into place until they formed a new mass covered in mouths and eyes with two long, slender limbs hooked with claws designed for pulling prey in close. The mouths chewed even though they were empty, a continuous rumination on invisible cud.

“What the hell is that?” Daniel sounded hushed, awestruck.

“That,” the Man in Black lifted his sword, “is the thing we have come to kill.” He looked over at me. His voice echoed inside my mind.

Remember our bargain, Acolyte.

I nodded sharply and followed the chaos god into battle against the Cancer God.

As we drew near, Mason began to laugh again. It was hard to hear over the wet, squelching, suctioning sound that came from the hideous mass of his god as it shuffled forward. The Man in Black stepped in front of it. The Cancer God towered over him, looming in an avalanche of carcinoma waiting to break and fall in a crushing wave. Nyarlathotep looked up serenely as he swung the sword in an almost lazy arc, the razor edge twinkling in the overhead light.

It took forever for the blade to strike.

It bit deep, the diseased flesh parting in a spill of fluid. The sword slipped straight through like quicksilver, not dragging, pausing, or catching. The flesh of the Cancer God didn't resist, merely parted around the blade and slapped together on the other side like wet lunch meat being stacked.

The Cancer God towered over me. My mind split in two. One part of me felt small, weak, and powerless in the face of such a monstrosity. It was the part that had been damaged so long ago, the broken part that never healed, just got pushed down. She made my knees go weak and my blood run cold with her fear.

The other part of me, her sister born in the same moment, was tired of that feeling. She held a storm of anger, white-hot with wrath.
She
pushed magick down my arm, through the symbol cut into my palm, and into the firebrand.

A four-foot conflagration jolted out of the weapon.

The Cancer God howled at me with dozens of mouths and lunged, falling toward me, wanting to crush me beneath it and absorb me into itself.

Twisting with my hips, I drove the cremation-hot blade of fire
deep
into one of the open mouths.

It slid in, the flesh around the fire bubbling, melting into a boil that spilled out and around the firebrand I held. The other mouths screamed, and the whole mass of Yar Shogura lurched to pull itself away.

My mind went blank, reverting to my training, and I lunged after it, pressing my advantage. I sawed my arm back and forth, swirling the blade inside the Cancer God. I pulled up, leaning into it, dragging the fire-blade through diseased flesh. I managed to cut upward until the flame-sword ripped free, making me stumble, nearly falling on the slime-covered floor.

The Cancer God recoiled. The wound channel didn't close. It gaped, cauterized and sealed. I had drawn back to strike again when the Man in Black called to me.

“Acolyte.”

I looked quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off the retreating Cancer God. The Man in Black had become a blur of darkness. His coat roiled around him, slapping against the Cancer God, holding the monstrosity back while its master wove a web of razor-sharp steel. The Man in Black leaned left, stretching long over his own leg, and sliced viciously.

A piece of Yar Shogura plopped onto the floor.

Daniel darted in, spearing it with the steel pole as it tried to crawl back to its host. A gout of brackish fluid pumped out, through the hollow pole, and over his shoulder. Arms straining, he pulled the chunk of living meat across the floor, dragging it away from the host. It quivered and strained, a fish on a hook, shaking and jerking, trying to free itself.

I ran over. “What do you want me to do?”

“Burn it,” Daniel yelled over the sucking noise of the Cancer God moving along the floor. He picked the tumor up with the pole, holding it out like spitted meat to be cooked.

I swung the firebrand, bathing the tumor chunk in flame. The fire crackled along its lumpy surface, and it began to sizzle and pop, releasing a hissing scream. I'd heard that sound before. Lobsters make that sound when dropped live in boiling water. High-pitched and horrible, it made me feel bad.

Then I remembered.

This was cancer.

This
thing
I burned and tried to kill, was the embodiment of the most evil disease I'd ever seen. It had taken the life of a person, its host, using them up as its food. It ate them away a cell at a time, stealing their life in tiny increments. This thing had choked the life out of my grandmother. It haunted me and my mother, waiting in our DNA to bear diseased fruit that would rot our lives away.

It would probably kill my mother one day.

It might kill me.

The flame roared, white hot, a supernova fed by the hatred running wild in my heart for this thing.

Die, you diseased piece of shit!

It shriveled in the crucible of my hate, hardening into a coal-black lump. Burning gobbets of melted fat dropped to the floor, sputtering out in the puddles of ichor at my feet.

“Ow, shit!” Daniel cried, dropping the pole to clang against the tile. The cancer briquette fell, bursting into charcoal dust as it hit the floor. It soaked into sludge in seconds. Daniel shook his hands, blowing on them.

I burned him.

The thought dashed cold water on my anger. The firebrand sputtered out in my hand. Grabbing Daniel's sleeve, I pulled his arm toward me where I could see it. His fist was clenched shut, but the skin I could see was red. “Let me look at it.”

“It's fine. I'll be okay.”

“Daniel, open your hand and let me see.”

Slowly his fingers uncurled. The skin across his palm and the undersides of his fingers had turned bright red, burned slick. It had already begun to bubble, a line of blister where he had gripped the pole.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

He shook his head. “It's okay. I should have let go sooner.” Reaching up, he pulled his sweatshirt over his head. Wet with fluid, it stuck to his skin. He dragged it off, wrapping it around his hands. I watched the play of his muscles, pulling and bunching smoothly under his skin. The ridges of his stomach twisted as he tied off the sleeve.

In the midst of all the chaos, for one confusing moment all I wanted to do was run my fingers across his skin. To touch him, to brush my nails across the hollow of his hipbone or run them up to his chest.

He looked up, caught me staring, and smiled the full Daniel smile, the sweet one that held a little streak of wild, a little recklessness. It made his green eyes look untamed; they sparkled like the stars in the sky.

They took my breath away.

We were caught in a moment, time suspended around us, and, for that too brief second, nothing else in the world mattered. No Man in Black, no Cancer God, no battle raging just across the room. Nothing but Daniel and me and the look we shared.

Then it all crashed down around us.

 

25

M
ASON APPEARED, JUST
there
suddenly, standing between Daniel and me. His arm lashed out, a golden blur that crashed against my chest and lifted me off my feet. I flew back and crashed against a bed. Pain, hard and sharp, drove into my back, shoving the air out of my lungs in a clenching spasm as though there weren't enough room inside my body to hold both. I slammed face-first to the floor.

For a second all I could do was lie there, my mind screaming at me:

Get up get UP!

I listened, sliding my hands under me even though it made my bones ache. I pushed myself up. The firebrand was gone, lost in my fall. I didn't look for it. I looked for Daniel.

He hung at the end of Mason's arm, feet dangling off the floor. He fought and kicked, fists pounding
against the arm holding him. With a snarl Mason drove him to the floor.

Daniel crashed. He kept his head up, rolling tight from years of wrestling training to keep from getting a concussion, but the slam drove the strength out of him. He fell limply, still struggling weakly as he gasped for air. Mason knelt over him, pressing him down with one arm. The priest was still naked except for the weird amulet that hung swinging from his neck. His free hand reached out and found one of the tumor chunks that the Man in Black had carved off his god.

He raised it over his head, hot-pink magick crackling up his arm and through the mass.

Oh no …