I took a deep breath. Honesty.
“I got off on hurting you,” I said. The admission felt like bitter rust in my mouth. “I wish to hell I hadn’t, and I wish I could take it back, but I don’t get a do-over, do I?”
The doppelganger shook his bloody head, his blue eyes bright and sharp.
“Was that really me?” I whispered. “Or was it Miko?”
The doppelganger reached up and put the pieces of his shattered jaw back in place, straightened his nose, smoothed his cuts away with his fingers as though his flesh were modeling clay. In seconds his face was restored.
“What do
you
think?” he asked, running his thick,
callused fingers through his black curly hair and smoothing the sprung curls of his mustache and beard.
“I think … I just don’t know. I’d like to think that if I had free will I’d never, ever do something like that. And certainly not to a friend.”
The Warlock arched an eyebrow at me, a familiar expression of disbelief. “Am I your friend?”
“Yes. Of course. You were the only person besides Mother Karen and Pal who helped me when Cooper disappeared.”
“Just because I’m useful doesn’t make me a friend. Just because I came through for my own brother doesn’t mean I did it to help you. Coop raised me from the dead, or damn close to it. I mean, I
had
to help, right?” He paused. “And I piss you off most of the time, don’t I?”
“Well, yeah, but being annoying doesn’t mean you’re not my friend.”
The Warlock stepped closer, gazing down at me intently. “I hit on you all the time. And that gets old in a hurry, doesn’t it? Unless …”
My mouth went dry. “Unless what?”
“Unless, deep down, you’re flattered by my attention. Unless maybe, just maybe, you don’t mind me being interested, because you’re interested, too.”
He took a step closer. “Unless maybe you fucked me in here because you wanted to fuck me all along. Maybe what you did was a little less about the power and a little more about the sex.”
I shook my head, my heart pounding. “No. I never thought about you like that before Miko touched me.”
“The devil made you do it, huh?” He laughed. “It wasn’t because part of you wanted to keep your options open in case things didn’t work out with Cooper?”
“No. No way. I never thought that,
ever
. Miko—”
“Miko’s not here now.” He stepped even closer. I could feel the heat of his body, smell clove cigarettes and his girlfriend Opal’s perfume lingering on his jacket. The scents made me think of hot, dark nightclubs where nobody could quite see what you were doing with your date in the shadowed booths. “Are you still thinking about me?”
“I … I …”
My control was slipping; my subconscious was flinging hidden blades I didn’t know how to block. I turned to flee for the portal door, but the Warlock grabbed my arm and pulled me back, wrapping me in an embrace. His beard rubbed against my bare neck, and the sensation sent a thrill through me.
“Let me go,” I said, my voice shaking. I could break free easily enough, throw him off and walk away, but I didn’t want to do any more violence to him. Even if this version of him wasn’t really him.
“Of course I will, if that’s what you really want,” he said. I could smell whiskey and sex on his breath. “But nothing makes you quite so crazy as an itch you’re not allowed to scratch, does it? Wouldn’t it be better to get it all out of your system in here where it’s safe?”
He leaned in and whispered in my ear, his words hot on my skin: “You might not survive Miko again. You could be dead tomorrow for all you know. You can’t have Cooper tonight, even if he makes it back in
time. You can’t have
anyone;
you’re infected. Diseased. The viruses could kill you, too. But that doesn’t matter in here. You’re the goddess here. Do you really want to deny yourself this one last chance to experience something you might never have again?”
I closed my eyes, feeling as though I were teetering on the head of a pin. “I’m safe in here.” It came out half mantra, half question.
“You’re safe in here,” said a voice. It wasn’t the Warlock’s.
I opened my eyes. A doppelganger of Cooper was standing in front of me, blocking my way to the portal door. He was bare chested, wearing only his tight tuxedo pants, his jaw closely shaven and his goatee neatly trimmed. He smelled like gingerbread spice and clean healthy man.
“You can have whatever you want in here,” Cooper said, and what little willpower I had left crumbled like a child’s sand castle under a north shore wave.
Cooper leaned down and kissed me, and I kissed him in return, kissed him deeply, pulling his body to mine. With a thought, we were naked. The Warlock behind me was bared, too, and Cooper pressed me back into the hairy, muscular wall of his half brother’s body. My heart felt like a bird trying to flutter free from a cage of bone. The men rubbed against me, Cooper’s lips moving from my mouth down to my breasts, the Warlock kissing the back of my neck and gently biting my shoulders. The Warlock’s cock was hard against my hips, and Cooper was at warm, wet attention against my belly.
“Do you like this?” Cooper asked.
“Yes.” It was hard to speak.
“Do you want more?” the Warlock asked.
“Ohgodyes,” I breathed.
Cooper slipped his hands down the back of my thighs and lifted me up. I wrapped my legs around his narrow waist as I slid down onto his delicious cock, my swollen flesh grinding against the rough patch of his pubic hair. The Warlock ran his hands lightly down my back to my ass, where he began to do the most amazing things with his fingers and tongue.
The sensations were so strong and so hot that I came with a cry, clinging to Cooper’s sinewy body as he pushed himself into me, and the shudders had barely passed when the room tilted and I was lying back on the Warlock on the bed. He was filling me from behind, stretching my flesh in ways I’d never been stretched, my arms and legs wrapped by his strong limbs, and Cooper was kneeling on the mattress between my legs, sucking my clit, bringing me to the brink again—
—and I was standing, pressed between their straining bodies, both men filling me, thrusting into me, their hands and lips and tongues and teeth all over me—
—a sudden dizziness took me, and we were on the bed again, my nerves at their mercy as another orgasm rocked me, they weren’t giving me a chance to take a breath, weren’t giving me a chance to even think, the doppelganger I’d made before had been a passive thing who didn’t even speak, but these creatures had turned aggressive and relentless—
“No, wait,” I gasped, trying to get up.
“You’re safe here,” Cooper soothed, hard at work
above me. “We have so much more for you; you just have to tell us what you want.”
“Tell us what you want,” the Warlock crooned behind me.
A chill washed through me as his words echoed in my memory. Miko’s mutinous lieutenant always said that to the people it parasitized:
tell me what you want
. And I’d dragged that shadow devil in here to kill it.
I remembered the sight of the disgusting jellylike creature melting into the floor as it perished … had some of the devil survived? Could it exist as a spirit fragment, a shade of the shadow?
Or had the nasty little thing gotten its hooks inside my head, planted seeds in my subconscious, and left me to reap them?
“I want to get out of here!”
But they weren’t letting me go. I looked to the dresser, seeking my enchanted sword and shield … and to my horror I realized they weren’t where I’d left them. They weren’t anywhere in sight. I felt my panic rise even as I came again under the doppelgangers’ sweaty pressure.
“Stay with us.…” Cooper whispered.
“Just stay with us.…” the Warlock echoed.
Cursing, I surged up beneath them, throwing off their grasping hands, and lurched toward the red portal door. My fingers touched the brushed steel handle just as I felt claws closing on my ankles—
I
came back to the living world, thrashing in the tepid water, fighting for breath. Jesus Christ. I lay back in the tub, shivering with fear and fever, trying to get my bearings. Jesus Jesus Jesus …
I stared up at a crack in the beige ceiling. The shadow of my own pulse darkened my vision with every beat. My stomach churned, and I felt hot tears begin to spill down my cheeks.
Trembling, I crawled out of the tub and stumbled wet and naked and weeping into the bedroom. I felt poisoned, violated, debased, and I wanted to be near someone who could make me feel safe.
“Pal, help.” My voice was a weak croak, too faint to hear.
He was curled up sound asleep on the pulled-out sofa-bed mattress. In his exhausted slumber, he looked both terrifying and fragile. My clean clothes were in a neat pile at the foot of the queen-size bed. Pal yawned and shifted, a stray ray of light from the gap in the blackout curtains shining on his gleaming, curved canine fang the size of a fighting knife. My loyal monster.
My opera glove was slipping down, and I could see my purple flames flickering above the cuff. Flames
that were inextricably linked to my hellement … and the nasty little devil that was apparently trying to use it against me.
I felt anger begin to surface in the churn of my emotions. The cold, hard rage dried my tears like a wind from Valhalla. How dare the shadow try to trick me in my own domain? How dare it invade my most private thoughts? How fucking
dare
it?
“You’re going to wish you’d never been spawned,” I whispered to the flames, then reached down to jerk my glove back into place.
Pal needed his sleep, and I needed to cowgirl up. I didn’t need a hug, I didn’t need a shoulder to cry on; I needed to take my goddamned hell back and kill the little slime before it got any stronger.
I marched into the bathroom to grab a towel. After I’d scrubbed the water off my body, I put my clothes back on. Being naked or dressed in the living world didn’t really matter once I went into the hellement, but I didn’t like the feeling of being exposed when I was getting ready for a fight. I’d take any psychological boost I could get.
I sat down on the toilet to pull my boots back on: dark gray knee-high dragonhide with English fire-drakes embossed on the vamps and shafts. They, along with my brown dragonskin pants, were loaners from the Warlock, although if I kept getting demon ichor and other random yuck splattered on them he probably wouldn’t want them back.
Thinking of the Warlock sent my mood plummeting again, but I sat up and mentally gave myself a shake. Dragonskins were warrior’s gear,
expensive
warrior’s gear, and the Warlock wouldn’t have lent
them to me if he didn’t think I deserved them. He wouldn’t have lent them to me if he hadn’t been my friend. He would have just given me a pair of Opal’s castoff engineer’s boots along with a cheerful “Good luck in hell!”
I stripped my opera glove off and stared into the flames, willing myself back into my hellement. I felt a strange vertigo, a sudden blindness, and when I came to I was standing beside the red portal door in my bedroom. My sword and shield were still nowhere in sight.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I sang to the seemingly empty room.
No response, no sound but the faint rush of the breeze in the oaks outside.
“If you make me come after you, I’m not gonna be gentle,” I said.
Well, I wasn’t going to be gentle, regardless, but I
was
anxious to get this over with. I paused, giving it a moment to reply. Still no sound. I’d have almost believed it wasn’t there at all, that my creepy threesome had just been a figment of my battle-stressed subconscious … if it weren’t for my missing sword and shield. When I was alone in here, my weapons had remained in plain view no matter what form I’d put the hellement in.
So, obviously I was no longer alone.
“Have it your way.” I closed my right eye and started blinking my left to switch to a different view with my stone eye, one that would show me the architecture of my hellement. Dimensions like this could easily trick flesh eyes, but not my ocularis; my father had enchanted the stone with care, ensuring that once
it was connected to my flesh and nerves it continued to work when I was a spiritual projection. Clearly his prophecy spells had told him I’d be spending a lot of time in diabolic places once I grew up.
Was I still pissed at him for not letting me know I was going to lose my eye in the first place? Hells yes—having my eye melted out of my skull by flaming demon ichor didn’t make for a fun evening. And I got a reminder of it every time I looked in the mirror and saw the scars on my face. But I couldn’t deny that the ocularis had been crucial when it came time to rescue Cooper.
I blinked through a half dozen views and finally found one that showed the hellement as a strange darkness at first, but the vision soon cleared so that I was seeing inside the insubstantial geometries that formed the dimension. And there, inside the smoke-like wall, I saw my sword and shield, solid and real, the only truly authentic objects in here.
“Nice try.” I stepped forward to retrieve my weapons. Once I’d slung my shield onto my arm and gripped my sword, I turned on my heel and scanned the room, seeking the shadow devil’s hiding place.
And there it was, under the bed, puddled like clotted blood between the jarred traumas, holding its breath, if it had breath to hold. It had an air of exhaustion, as if its previous attempt to trap me had wiped out its reserves.
“I should’ve guessed you’d be hiding under there, little monster.” I laughed, willing the bed away.
The devil gave a start when the sheltering mattress and box spring disappeared, and I raised my sword, preparing to spear it to the floorboards. Too late I
realized it was clutching one of the jars, ready to fling the contents at me. I took a step back, but the shadow’s aim was good and silver memory like liquid mercury splashed into my face—
I was Cooper’s father, Corvus, down in the bottom of the pit in the basement, staring up at Lake Jordan, my beloved Siobhan’s husband. My eyes were swollen and red, my hands and back aching, and my palms blistered from digging this hole I was trapped in. My testicles ached from a hundred kinds of abuse. I wanted to throw up, but there hadn’t been anything in my stomach for nearly a week
.