Seized: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 4) (16 page)

“Now I shall punish you!” the bat cackled as a statue of a bat that glittered like freshly spun gold burst from the lava. “Prepare for trouble!”

“As long as it’s not double,” I murmured under my breath. Either way, I was going to have to deal with this bat, and if doing so would get me one step closer to saving those kids, I was all for it, even if it did have repercussions for me. Besides, I’d already lost my eternal soul, what more could his curse do to me?

I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not, but as the bat landed on the statue of the bat, a dense cloud of purple smoke began to pour from the statue. Lightning crackled through the cloud as the tiny bat threw its head back and cackled.

“You thought you could trick me into opening the door for you, and because you were so naïve as to think you could fool me, I will open the door for you,” it said, flicking its wings toward a tiny lever set into the base of the statue. “But first I shall have my revenge.” He flapped his wings, and as he did, the cloud expanded to fill the entire room. “Bippity, boppity, boo!”

A bolt of lightning exploded from the cloud, striking me in the center of my chest, and even though it lacked a certain manliness I’d come to expect from myself, I was unable to do more than unleash my inner ten-year-old girl and let her scream her head off.

As the cloud engulfed me, arcs of electricity cascaded off of it, striking the tattoos on my arm and filling them with a deep, rust-red glow. The cat in my skull yowled in protest as the bat hopped down from the statue and casually flicked the lever.

The door I was clinging to vanished, and as I fell down into the lava and disappeared into its depths, the last thing I heard was the bat’s insane gloating. “I laugh at your misfortune. Mwahaha! I have doubled the strength of your curse and made it twice as bad! Even if you try to succeed now, you will now likely fail. Have a nice day!”

Chapter 17

“Mac, wake up!” Jenna said, shaking me. I opened my bleary eyes and found myself staring up at her concerned face. I was still in the lava room, only I wasn’t in the lava anymore. I was lying on a gunmetal gray grate about fifty feet below the door the crazy ass bat had opened. I couldn’t see him nor his the statue anymore, and while amethyst flames still flickered high overhead, there was no more fire on the walls.

“What’s going on?” I asked, and as the words left my mouth, I almost choked. My mouth was so dry it hurt to talk.

“You opened the door,” Marvin said with a shrug. “I’m not sure how, but good job. Let’s get a move on. Tacos and beer are waiting.”

“He is Cursed. His victory does not surprise me,” Vitaly said, pushing past Marvin and offering me his hand.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, taking his hand and letting the big man hoist me to my feet. He did it so easily, it was kind of unnerving. “Say, anyone have anything to drink?” I tried to work up some spit, but swallowing hurt so much, I just gave up.

“Yeah, sure,” Marvin said, grabbing his backpack and upending it on the floor. His sister tumbled out of the backpack, smashed her wooden skull on the grate, and bounced a couple times before coming to rest by my feet. A blood-smeared thirty-two ounce bottle of Lemon-Lime Gatorade hit the grate alongside his sister and rolled a bit before getting caught in the slats of the grating.

“What the fuck?” Wendy cried as Marvin snatched her up.

“Is there a problem, Sis?” he asked, and as he attempted to shove her back into the backpack, she smacked him across the face. The sound rang out with that thick, meat slapping a counter sound.

“Yeah, you dropped me on purpose,” she snapped, glaring at him.

“You have a head like a rock, it’s fine,” he said, holding her out at arm’s length. “But I promise not to do it again, okay?”

“I don’t believe you,” Wendy said, but even as the words left her mouth, she sort of deflated. “But I’m going to trust you because I basically have to trust you.”

“Fair enough,” Marvin replied, shoving her into the backpack before picking up the Gatorade and tossing it to me. I caught it in one hand, doffed the lid, and swallowed the lemon-lime goodness. I wasn’t usually a fan of warm Gatorade, but right now, it was pretty much the best thing I’d ever tasted.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Marvin said, glaring at me in a way that made me think he was mad at me because his sister was angry at him for dropping her.

“Yeah, I won’t,” I said as he turned on his heel and made his way toward the ladder at the far end of the room. I wasn’t sure if he actually felt bad about what had happened, or was just annoyed his sister was angry. For some reason, I thought it might have been the first part.

“Don’t mind him. He’s just mad because he lost the bet,” Jenna said, leaning close to me and whispering into my ear. “He gave me ten to one odds you were going to die.” She flashed a grin at me. “If I’ve learned one thing, it’s to always bet on Mac Brennan surviving.”

“Awesome, you’re buying dinner then,” I said, glaring at the teen as he scrambled up the fifty-foot ladder like a goddamned monkey. I couldn’t believe he’d bet against me. Even if he’d thought I was going to die, it was kind of a dick move.

“It’s a date,” she said before following Vitaly up the ladder. I watched them go, hoping I hadn’t just inadvertently agreed to an actual date. If I had, there was no way that would go over well with Ricky. Still, it might be worth it if I could get some more details out of my past…

Either way, Jenna had probably just said that as a figure of speech. Besides, she seemed to alternate between kindness and hatred on a regular basis. Assuming we survived our jaunt through Hell, she was pretty likely to hate me by the end of it. I pushed it out of my mind, deciding to worry about it if and when it came up.

After they’d gone far enough up the ladder that I wasn’t worried they’d fall on top of me, I began to climb up after them. I grabbed the bars, and as I pulled myself up a few feet, a horrible realization filled my brain. The higher I went, the hotter the bars became. I was only halfway, but it was already so bad that every time I touched the next rung, I had the urge to pull my hands back, only if I did, I’d fall. I gritted my teeth, concentrating on anything and everything but my throbbing hands and kept going. By the time I reached the top and pulled myself on the tiny platform, my hands were throbbing so badly, I was sure they were going to blister.

The door ahead of us was open, but like most of the other doors I’d seen in Beleth’s lair, it didn’t reveal where it actually led. The threshold was filled with crackling storm clouds, and as arcs of lightning shot from the space, I felt myself cringe backward. I wasn’t sure what the Bat in the Hat had done to me when he’d made my curse twice as bad, but I was sure it couldn’t be good. Thankfully, my left arm still looked pretty normal. Part of me had worried I was going to wake up with two blackened arms, but it looked like I’d managed to dodge that bullet.

Either way, I was betting my demon knew exactly what had happened. Getting her to tell me on the other hand… That was the trick. Still, it was worth a try.

“Do you know what he did to me?” I asked the cat demon, broadcasting the thought through the annals of my mind.

“Yes,” she said, quirking an annoyed eyebrow at me. “Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as you think.”

“Awesome,” I muttered as she put her head back down and shut her eyes. “Care to tell me more?”

“No,” she said, and with that word, my mental image of her vanished, leaving me to stand there alone and wonder what had happened. Still, she did seem to have a vested interest in my future and if she wasn’t worried, maybe I shouldn’t be either? Okay, yeah, that was a stupid thought, but since I had nothing else, I went with it.

“Ready?” Jenna asked, her hand drumming anxiously on her leg as Marvin and Vitaly made their way through the door. “Cause I’ll be honest, I’ve had it up to here with these doors.”

“Same,” I said and stepped through the clouds because if I stayed out here with her, I was going to want to comfort her, and I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

I won’t lie, the clouds hurt, but then again, I was sort of getting used to the whole stepping into an electrical storm thing. If this kept up, I’d soon be worthy to hold Mjolnir myself. You know, assuming the only criterion was willingness to step into a thunderstorm while being as metal as possible. If it wasn’t, well, I might just have to break out my Thor Underoos, brush my teeth, and eat all my vitamins for a few days. Either way, I had a plan.

The landscape on the other side of the door was a frozen wasteland. Rolling hills of snow filled the horizon in every direction for as far as I could see. For a second, I worried we were going to have to cross it on foot, but then I spied an icy staircase stretching upward into the sky like a stairway to Heaven. Knowing my luck, there was no chance we wouldn’t be taking the stairs.

To be fair, I wasn’t sure that’s where we needed to go, but I was also going by intuition based upon the heated argument my compatriots were having with a snowman. That’s right. There was a snowman. In Hell.

The snowman, complete with a corncob pipe, a button nose, and two eyes made out of coal, stood next to the first step, one branch-like arm clutching a velvet rope while the other arm angrily waved a clipboard in front of Vitaly and Marvin.

“I’m sorry, but the rules are quite clear. Your name is not on the list and therefore you must make the requisite sacrifice to go up the stairs,” the snowman said in a voice that reminded me of Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy. “It’s right here in subsection C.”

“And what is the sacrifice?” Jenna asked, padding over to me. I hadn’t even heard her come through the door.

“That stupid snowman wants us to cut open our palms and give it our blood,” Marvin said indignantly. “As if.”

“So what’s the big deal?” I asked, quirking an eyebrow at them. “Just give him some blood and let’s get this show on the road.”

“If he has our blood, he can hex us. I’m not talking minor stuff here. He could literally make our skulls explode from the inside,” Marvin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’ll come back to life so it doesn’t really bother me, but still. It’s the principle, you know? I like to follow a whole ‘avoid certain death’ policy when I can.”

“Yeah, that’s understandable,” I said, walking up to him and putting one hand on his shoulder. “I mean there’s only kids down there, trapped and alone. A little bit of our blood is definitely not worth their lives.”

“Exactly,” Marvin said, smiling at me like I was his best friend in the world. “See, Mac gets it. The trade isn’t worth it.”

“Then don’t go up,” the snowman said, shrugging. “It’s no skin off my nose.”

“I will make sacrifice,” Vitaly said, holding out his palm to the scarecrow. “Take enough for all to pass.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the snowman replied with a shake of his head. “I’m not sure if you’ve heard the saying ‘about as much chance as a snowball in Hell’ but let me tell you, that shit won’t fly.”

Well, that settled it. If we were going to get to those kids and save them, Marvin was going to have to donate some damned blood. If that came back to haunt him, well, I could live with that.

Vitaly ground his teeth together, and as he turned to look at Marvin, I snatched the straight razor from the teen’s hand, and as he instinctively reached for it, I slashed open his palm. Marvin’s bright red blood splattered across the steps in front of us, and before he could protest further, I’d cut open my own palm, adding my blood to the mix.

“Whoops,” I said as my blood hit the icy steps.

“Two more,” the snowman said, gesturing at the velvet rope. Its substance had faded so the entire rope was translucent and insubstantial.

“What the actual fuck, Mac?” Marvin said, clasping his bleeding hand to his chest while I tossed the knife to Vitaly. Without a word, the big Russian, cut open his palm and added his blood to the pile. “I thought we were bros.”

“You do realize we’ve been bleeding all over the place and we’ve left your sister’s corpse back there behind us? If they wanted our blood, they’d have it already,” I said, shaking my head at the pouting teen.

As Vitaly’s blood hit the snow in front of us with a hiss, the rope practically vanished.

“You too, Miss. It has to be all of you or it won’t work.” The snowman smiled broadly. “That’d be too bad.”

Jenna gritted her teeth as she took the razor from Vitaly. “I’m not a huge fan of self-mutilation,” she said, before slicing open her own palm and spilling her blood onto the steps. Frozen air whooshed by, chilling me to the bone as the snowman vanished along with his rope, leaving us staring at a staircase that stretched upward in a series of endless loops.

“Well, I hope you fuckers brought your climbing gear because it’s a long way up,” Marvin said, anger filling his voice as he snatched the razor back from Jenna and shoved it in his pocket. Then he marched past us like an angry toddler and began making his way up the stairs. As I watched him go, a sigh escaped my chest. Why did it have to be stairs?

Chapter 18

I won’t bore you with the details of how much it fucking sucked to walk up slippery ice stairs, but it did. Not even a little bit either. It was a whole boatload of suck and was completely unlike everything I’d come to expect based on Disney’s Frozen. The people who made that movie are fucking liars. No one dances up a staircase made of ice singing, that’s for damned sure.

The only upside to this particular staircase was the distinct lack of a homicidal ice queen and her abominable snowman. Yes, I was a little sad there was no Olaf, but I was taking the good with the bad.

“I guess this is where I do my thang!” Marvin said, clambering across the landing and approaching the frosted metal door in front of us. It was set in between bricks of solid blue ice in such a way that made me think it might be easier to just try to melt the surrounding area. If we did, wouldn’t it just fall out onto the floor?

Then again, while it didn’t feel cold to me, the others were shivering like crazy. Maybe it’d be harder to melt than I thought? Even though I couldn’t feel it on my skin or in my lungs when I breathed, I knew it had to be cold because the couple times I’d spit over the edge of the staircase, my spittle had frozen the moment it left my mouth. I wasn’t sure how cold it needed to be for that to happen, but I was willing to bet the temperature had to be significantly below freezing. So why wasn’t I cold?