Infernal: Bite The Bullet (23 page)

Chest out, chin up, Dante strutted up to
Konstantyn, his muscles much more defined than I’d imagined when he’d been
wearing the suit.

Konstantyn growled around the gag and thrashed in
his chains.

“So much anger,” Dante said, his voice deceptively
soft, “so much life beating in this chest.” He laid a palm on Konstantyn’s
sternum and Konstantyn let out a muffled scream. When he pulled away, a
smoking, blistered handprint remained.

Jesus
. What had he used to burn him? Acid?
Dante looked unaffected, but I could see the whites of Konstantyn’s eyes as he
roared in agony.

“Don’t fight it, Lazarus. You were chosen for
this, hand-picked when you were just a boy. It is a great privilege. This glorious
body will live on, long after you are dead.” He leaned forward and flicked a
forked, serpentine tongue over Konstantyn’s cheek.

I squirmed, helpless, horrified, as Konstantyn
recoiled from the monster Dante had become.

“You are destined to become a link in my chain of
never-ending life. Have I not loved you, nurtured you as my son? Groomed you
for this very purpose? Without my intervention, you would have died on your
first mission. You’ve been on borrowed time ever since. Embrace the end, and
the beginning.”

Only then did I see the blade Dante had concealed
in his other hand: a bone-hilted dagger mounted with the seven-pointed star. He
thrust and I screamed at the flash of silver that buried hilt-deep beneath
Konstantyn’s ribs. Blood poured and Dante hummed happily as he accepted a
chalice from one of his followers and held it under the gush of blood spilling
from the wound. “The final sacrifice. Even in death you serve me, Lazarus.
Faithful unto death.”

He stood eye-to-eye with Konstantyn, and with every
laboured breath Konstantyn took, blood pumped into the engraved cup. “It is an
intimate thing, possessing another man’s body,” Dante said. “More intimate even
than the sexual rites necessary to complete the exchange.” Dante ripped off the
gag, grasped Konstantyn by the nape of his neck, and pressed their lips firmly
together.

As soon as he pulled back from the kiss,
Konstantyn spoke. “Neva,” he cried, and it broke my heart to hear the words
rattle in his throat, “you know what to do.”

Yes, I knew. But was I brave enough to go through
with it alone? A hot tear slid from the outer corner of my eye and into my
hairline.

“Your little bitch knows what to do alright.
She’ll scream on command. She’ll take the seed of the seven in her belly and
bear me a child conceived through pain. Just like the mother, and the mother’s
mother before her, the creation of new life will be the catalyst for my
rebirth.”

That was his plan? To impregnate me? I stifled the
hysterical laugh that bubbled up my throat. “Hey, Psycho,” I called, “I think
you’ve got a problem here. Haven’t you heard of birth control? Guess that wasn’t
an issue for you demon types back in the Middle Ages.”

Dante spun on a laugh. “That was taken care of at
your first audition.”

I flashed back to a moment in the changing room,
when my pills had fallen out of my bag into the floor. I’d been so sure they’d
been zipped inside my makeup purse. Jeez. They’d manipulated even that? I
shuddered. No matter, I thought, probing the capsule with my tongue. This whole
psychotic charade was never going to get that far. “You’ve thought of
everything,” I said sarcastically.
Everything except this one small thing.

“I have, and this time, there will be no running,”
Dante said, turning back to Konstantyn. “As your friend here is discovering, the
price of disloyalty is an eternity of pain.” Dante laughed, and Konstantyn
sprayed his face with bloody spittle.

“You dare spit in my face!” He snarled up close to
Konstantyn, toe to toe with him and trembling with rage. “Again and again, you
disappoint me, and again and again, I give you chances.” He yanked the gag back
into place. “Don’t worry,” he breathed, “you’ll live long enough to watch us
bleed her, to see us fuck her, to hear her screams of terror turn to pleasure.
You wanted in on this. Welcome to your ringside seat. I am a man of my word, am
I not?” He scrubbed a hand down his mottled face and paced away from
Konstantyn, squaring up to each of the other assembled men, poking them each in
turn in the centre of their chests, daring them to contradict him. “You won
your election. You got promoted to detective. Your daughter’s leukaemia is
cured. Wealth, fame, success beyond your imaginings. Whom do you worship?”

“Barron,” they chanted through their grotesque
masks. “Barron. Barron.”

Dante Barron dipped a finger into the cup, and in
Konstantyn’s warm blood traced a seven-pointed star on my quivering stomach.
When he was done, that forked tongue flicked out, gleaning the remnants of
blood from his hand. The bass music dropped in time with their intonations, and
my heart stopped.

It was a signal. It was the start. The beginning
of the end.

Konstantyn dangled weakly in his chains, slumped
in pain and breathing so shallowly, I could barely see the rise and fall of his
powerful chest.

I had no hope left. It trickled away with the
ribbons of blood seeping from the man who’d fought so hard to save me.

I couldn’t look away from him, even when the first
lash broke like a streak of fire across my stomach. Another lash, then another,
painted my skin in red lines that beaded crimson, and once they broke that
first cry from my lungs, I couldn’t drag the sounds back. The cuts got deeper
with every flick of Alexei’s wrist. The masked Friar wielded a lit candle,
splashing wax like molten lava to my whip-raw flesh. The pain of it struck like
lightning, bowing my body up until I was straining at my bonds, and making the
Friar spill more of that searing agony over my breasts.

I didn’t understand how I was still conscious.

With tears rolling down my cheeks, I found
Konstantyn’s devastated expression. There would be no tender goodbyes for us,
only a violent, ugly exit.

My torturers circled me, replacing their sadistic
tools into the holders attached to the star, and I used the brief reprieve to
ease the capsule from inside my cheek, carefully manipulating it between my
molars.

Not yet, Neva. Be brave a little longer. Make
it count. Let them believe they’ve won.

I didn’t feel brave. Every instinct I had clung to
the prospect of living, in spite of what lay ahead.

The chanting slowed, my tormentors coming to stand
at the points of the star, their horned masks looming over me in the flickering
light.

Dante held forth the chalice containing
Konstantyn’s blood in one hand, and the bone-handled dagger in the other.

I hardly felt the slice of the blade as he cut
across my wrist, but as my blood dripped into the cup, the wound began to
sting.

The chanting started up again, mounting to a
crescendo of rhythmic, guttural prayer. I chanced one last look at Konstantyn,
and instantly regretted it. He looked a step away from death and as his breaths
stuttered, my heart skipped.

This was it.

I repositioned the capsule between my teeth. Like
an almond in a nutcracker, I thought, all it needed was the right amount of
pressure.

Dante loomed over me, holding the cup, his naked
form spattered with my blood. “Drink,” he bellowed, “that through the alchemy of
creation, Barron shall be reborn.”

He pressed the cool metal rim to my lips and I
tasted blood, metallic and salty.

A look of maniacal excitement lit up Dante’s
distorted face.

He thought he’d won.

“Yes. More,” he demanded, tipping the cup until
the blood was running down my chin.

He thought he had it all, but I was the one
smiling, tears streaming down my face as I bit down on the capsule and lifted
my head to bring the rim closer to my lips.

“Enough,” Konstantyn announced. “We all must drink
to complete the circle.”

Cradling the chalice in both hands, he passed the
grisly thing from mouth to mouth, and each in turn, the horned devils drank
greedily from it. Then Dante drank deep, the blood staining his lips.

A sort of peace settled over me, that lightness of
knowing you’ve done everything you can, and your burden is in fate’s hands.

Nothing to do but wait for the end.

Konstantyn had said the capsule was ancient. Would
it even work?

I’d know soon enough.

Incantations bounded around the stone room, so
loud the candles flickered.

He’d promised death within minutes.

But he’d promised other things too, things that
never came to pass.

What if he was wrong?

I felt nothing.

Someone coughed.

Choked.

As Dante lifted the cup to Konstantyn’s lips, the
first of the seven fell to the floor, and in turn, the rest followed, clawing
at their throats as they struggled to breathe.

A mask rolled to a stop against the foot of the
altar, and my eyes found the face it uncovered. It was the doctor from the
morgue, his white moustache speckled with red. He foamed at the mouth, and
before my eyes, his red face swelled and distorted. Around me, five bodies
danced to the Beastrider beat in a macabre death-throe twitching that left me
shuddering.

“Whore!” Dante’s voice was thunder cracking over
my pain-wracked body, and I jolted at the shout, wide eyes finding the furious
storm of crazy striding towards me.

How was he still alive? How was I? I’d spat the
poison into the cup as soon as I felt the capsule crack, but I fully expected
to die. I’d only hoped to take as many of them with me as I could, but there
wasn’t time to think about that now.

He flung the chalice across the room, splattering
the walls. “What have you done, you whore? You’ve ruined everything! Do you
know how long it will take me to assemble another seven? To find another body?”

“That was kind of the point, you sick bastard,” I
said.

He spat in my face and I gave him a bloody smile,
the pain that was riding me almost a high. Or maybe that was the cyanide,
taking what life I had left.

Perhaps it wasn’t good to further enrage the
psychopath. Dante snatched up the Friar’s favourite candle, its top quivering
with a terrifying well of molten wax.

“You won’t need your eyes to perform.” He lifted
the flame right over my face and I screamed as I slammed up, head-butting the
candle and spraying the liquid wax into Dante’s face.

My skin burned with spots that caught me in the
collision, but he was the one screaming now, and I got a certain satisfaction
from watching the skin blister and peel as he raked his own flesh in mindless
agony.

In the midst of the chaos, beams of light
illuminated the candle-lit darkness, sweeping out to flash over my skin. I
squinted at a head-on beam, trying to clear the spots from my vision and
identify the people coming in.

In the end, I didn’t have to. They announced
themselves.

“This is the London Metropolitan Police. Come out
with your hands up.” There was authority and shock in that voice, and I knew
the sight we must have made, blood and death and nudity all in one sordid
place.

“Mother of God,” someone cried.

“It’s the Halloween party from Hell,” another
said, kicking the mask that rolled under his feet.

“I think I know this one. Holy shit, that’s Oliver
Dalton, from the homicide division.”

Tied to my sacrificial podium, I could do nothing
but slump in relief. My eyes sought out Konstantyn through the darkness, and
the flash of green in his eyes as he smiled weakly at me was all I needed to
keep breathing. He hadn’t drunk from the cup.

Gracie had called for help, and they’d come.
They’d finally come.

Dante was still screaming, fighting the officers
who had him pinned to a wall while they cuffed him. “I have diplomatic
immunity. You can’t touch me. Do you understand?”

A police officer whirled him about and shone a
torch right in his face. He recoiled from the light. His horns were gone, I
noticed. When he’d found the time to remove them, I couldn’t say. As for his
reptilian eyes? Well, they were swollen almost shut by the molten candle wax.

A kind-faced female officer draped me in a shock
blanket and as she worked to free my wrists and ankles, I glimpsed Mariya being
marched away in handcuffs. I heard none of the officer’s soothing nonsense or
soft questions. All my attention was on Konstantyn, who’d been released from
his chains.

He looked so strong as he strode towards the
officers wrestling with Dante’s claims of diplomatic immunity.

“Are you immune to this, asshole?” Konstantyn
growled. None of us saw the fist coming, but suddenly Dante was an unresponsive
heap on the floor, and Konstantyn was shaking out his hand as the police moved
to restrain him. I shivered in my blankets and laughed when he just grinned at
them.

“It’s okay. I’m done,” he said, weaving on his
feet.

They shook their heads, the looks on their faces
the universal expression for ‘so done with this shit’, but then Konstantyn’s
knees buckled, and like watching it in slow motion, he hit the ground with a
muscled thud. Officers and medics rushed to his side while I watched on in a
daze, seeing his blood creep across the floor as they gathered around him.

The city hospital was both the last and the only
place I wanted to be. Though the police and medical staff treated me like fine
china from the moment they’d unchained me and draped the blanket around my
naked shoulders, there was no getting around the unpleasantness of the intimate
examinations and probing questions their investigations required. Those first
days I’d spent in a dreamlike bubble, robotically following commands, and
scarcely believing the events of the past week were anything but a terrible
nightmare.