while the black stars burn (18 page)

I pushed the door open a little wider and stepped inside.

A sudden blur of movement from the shadows, and something grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, yanking me into the shack, jerking my finger on the shotgun’s trigger. The boom nearly deafened me. Miko gave a grunt of pain and released the gun, but she’d already sent me tumbling sideways. I caught a glimpse of her belly torn wide open by the shotgun blast as I went past her. I fell heavily and slid across the gritty floor. My impact knocked one of the lawn chairs over and sent beer cans clattering, but I didn’t lose my grip on my shotgun.

I barely had time to sit up and rack another cartridge into the chamber before she’d gathered her slippery guts up and expertly packed them back into her body, her flesh sealing below her fingers. I’d never seen any creature be able to heal itself so quickly, not even a werewolf in full lunacy.

“Miko, I can help—” I began, but she screamed and leaped at me, the movement inhumanly fast.

So much for negotiation
, I thought as I swung my shotgun up, managing to catch her hard under her chin with the barrel as she fell upon me. I pulled the trigger. The blast took the left half of her head off, showering me with blood and bits of bone and brains. Snapshot memories of thousands of deaths flashed through my mind in quick succession. I was momentarily dazzled, but they weren’t strong enough to pull me in.

And…she wasn’t stopping. My horror turned to the most abject, shivering terror I’ve ever felt. Making a terrible gargling noise, she swung at me with her left fist as she wrestled me for the shotgun with her right. I ducked her first punch, but her second connected with my right eye with a nasty bone crack and my vision went white with pain.

In that precious second of lost consciousness, I’d let go of my weapon and had gone sprawling on my back. Miko stood over me, holding my shotgun by the barrel, glaring down at me with her one good eye as her blasted-apart head dripped blood down her naked body. Most of her brains had slithered out of the wet red cavity of her skull and right then I realized that flesh was nothing more than a convenient vessel for whatever she had become. Her own body was as much a meat puppet as those of any of the townspeople she’d possessed. And in her green glare, she promised me unimaginable torment.

My mind raced like a rabbit from one desperate idea to another. Gouge out her remaining eye? No guarantee that would actually take away her sight. Try to blast her with incendiary ectoplasm? I’d burn myself just as badly as I’d burn her. And what could burning do to her, anyhow? She was about to carve me up like a holiday turkey and she didn’t even have a working nervous system.

So I slapped my hand on her gory ankle, closed my eyes and willed us both into my private hell. I’d tried to make the hellement homier by turning it into a recreation of my old bedroom back home. The décor change almost made up for the bad vibes from the endless stock of bad memories I’d stored in there. Almost.

Miko shoved me hard, sending me tumbling over the bed and into my dresser.

“
Korosu-zo!
How dare you do this to me?” she screamed. Her head and body were whole again but she was opening her mouth so wide her skull was deforming. She didn’t seem quite real here in my hellement; she looked more like one of those creepy silicone sex dolls you can buy for a couple thousand bucks off the Internet. All the parts for supernatural hotness were still there, but they didn’t add up to the hormone-enslaving whole she wielded in the living world.

Not that she was the least bit interested in seducing me or anyone else at that moment.

“I can help.” I inched toward the enchanted sword and shield I kept in the corner.

“Fuck your help.” Miko stepped forward, then winced, shuddering, holding her head and doubling over as if she’d been hit with a sudden migraine. My devil was probably rocking her inner world. I took the opportunity to grab my defenses, slinging my shield onto my left arm.

“I’m serious.” I gripped my sword and pointed it at her, but made no move to attack. “I can help you.”

My weapon-hand was steady. Being in my own domain had calmed my fears considerably, and now I was focused on my goal: getting the stolen souls out of her safely. If I could destroy her after that, great, but killing her before I’d tried to rescue the innocents inside her was no good at all. And I wasn’t even remotely sure that she was killable, anyhow. I blinked my magic stone eye through to the view that had once shown me a shadow-devil’s vulnerable heart in my boyfriend’s hell. But I saw nothing inside Miko’s doll body, just a solid darkness.

Maybe if I fought her hard enough, she’d have second thoughts about laying waste to another isolated town. If I could prevent her from staging another mass murder, that would be almost as good as taking her out of commission entirely, wouldn’t it? A smaller victory, sure, but it would still be a victory.

“We can help each other,” I repeated.

She straightened up, slowly, giving me a look that was pure death. “I don’t need help.”

“Sure you do,” I said reasonably. “It’s my devil, and I know how to kill it. I can take it right out of you. And I’m thinking that if
you
knew how to get rid of it on your own, you’d have done it by now, right?”

Boy, did that piss her off. Miko snarled and launched herself at me, and I jumped back, right into the dresser. The mirror rattled against the wall. The room was way too small to fight her. In an instant I willed away the entire building and we were in the middle of the broad, spacious lawn where my parents’ house would have been in my old neighborhood.

I sidestepped her lunge and gave her a solid thwack with my shield, sending her tumbling across the grass. But she wasn’t down long. She flipped herself over fast as a cat and leaped at me again. I raised my shield to deal her a second blow, but her move was a feint and she punched the tendon bundle on the inside of my right wrist, knocking my sword out of my hand and leaving my whole arm tingling.

She darted after the enchanted sword, snatching it up from the lush grass with her left hand. But the sword didn’t want to be held, at least not by her. Miko’s palm and fingers sizzled on the leather grip. She didn’t let go of the burning weapon and merely smiled at me through clenched white teeth.

“I learned to master pain a long time ago,” she said. “Let’s see how you do with it once I’ve rammed this down your pretty throat.”

She raised the sword toward me, her left hand smoking horribly now, and I realized her switchblade had appeared in her right hand. Oh, crap. How did she do that? She gave the stiletto a casual twirl over the backs of her fingers and into her fist again, like a professional gambler turning a table trick with a poker chip.

I raised my shield and began to back up, trying to think of a new strategy. Once she made her next attack, I could defend against the sword, but she’d slice me to ribbons with her stiletto before I could say “sashimi.” I’d been hurt in here before, hurt badly, but not mortally. What would happen if she cut my throat, tore out my heart? Would I die? Could she take my soul? Or would my soul be trapped in here forever, my body another puppet for her to use as she pleased? I shuddered to think of the twisted games she would play with my boyfriend once she had control of my flesh and could pretend to be me.

The portal door was just a few feet away. I could make a run for it—but what then? She’d manifested her switchblade; if she had more time in here by herself, would she start figuring out ways of taking over my hellement? My gut told me the answer was a resounding “yes” and she’d do it a lot more quickly than the shadow-devil had. Would she figure a way out and start possessing my body as the Goad had? Jesus. The danger was too great. I couldn’t possibly run; I had to find some way to subdue her.

I knew the jarred traumas I’d stored in my hellement were just a few feet behind me. She might have a tremendous tolerance for physical pain, but she didn’t really seem to like it much, either. And what about emotional pain?

Miko lunged at me again, and I braced myself, trying to make my body small behind the shield. She was almost on me when she gave a gasp and fell to her knees. My Goad was giving me another bit of good luck. I jumped backwards into the jars and grabbed the nearest one; by the feel of it, it was a night of torment at a sadist’s cruel hands.

The jar opened with a pop in my shield hand just as Miko recovered and rushed me. I threw the silver liquid right in her eyes. Howling, she dropped her blades and fell onto the grass, writhing in agony, clawing at her face.

I grabbed another jar—the memory of a woman being flayed to death—as Miko frantically tried to scrape away the heavy fluid.

“I’ll stop if you agree to my terms,” I shouted at her, loud so my voice would carry through whatever she was hearing in the memory.

Miko snarled something unintelligible, maybe it was Japanese and maybe it was just word-salad, but she was getting up again so I threw the contents of the second jar at her, getting more in her mouth this time. She collapsed, retching, twitching in the throes of the re-lived murder.

“You want more? Really?” I loosened the lid on a third jar: a friend getting his throat cut open. I knew
that
one was plenty unpleasant. “I’ve got hundreds of these. Thousands, maybe. I can do this
forever
. But say the word and I’ll stop.”

Miko slowly rose to her knees as she wiped her face off, fat silver droplets tumbling down her neck and cleavage, sticking briefly in her pubic hair before they fell into the blades of grass. Then she raised her hands, palms up in a surrendering gesture. I didn’t believe it, so I flipped the lid off and kept the jar ready.

“Okay, enough.” Her voice was hoarse, and she didn’t take her eyes off the memory in my hand. “What do you want?”

“I’ll kill the Goad inside you, put it out of your misery. But you have to do something for me in return.”

“What?”

“I want you to release the souls you took in Cuchillo.”

Her eerie, beautiful features twisted in anger and indignation. “No!”

“Then we have a problem.” I cocked my arm back, ready to let the next trauma fly.

She flinched. “Wait! Stop. I…I will let any souls leave me,
if
they want to leave. I won’t cast out those that prefer my afterlife.”

I frowned at her. “They’ll have free will to make the choice? And we’ll all be free to go back to the living world, without your interference?”

“Yes, you and they will be free.” Grimacing, she wiped the rest of the memories off her face and scrubbed her hands clean on the grass.

I paused, considering. “I don’t trust you. I need a binding promise. A blood oath.”

Using the sharp nail of her left index finger, she cut an X in the skin above her heart and held her hand over the bleeding cuts. Blood welled between her fingers. “I swear on my own soul that I am standing down to allow Jessie Shimmer into my domain. If she slays the devil plaguing my world, I will allow any souls in my possession to leave with her if they so choose. I will not interfere, and I will allow her and the souls who follow her to re-enter the living world unharmed.”

She cleared her throat and looked at me, her expression a mixture of suspicion and disdain. “Does this oath meet with your approval?”

I licked my lips, trying to imagine any loopholes that Miko could use to strangle me. “Promise you won’t try to keep me from killing the devil. Promise you won’t try to hurt me or my friends when we get back to the living world.”

Her fingers tightened over her wound. “I further swear on my own soul that I will in no way hinder Jessie Shimmer while she is in my domain. Nor will I attempt to harm her or anyone else of concern to her when we return to the living world.”

She stopped for a moment, staring at me. “However, I do
not
promise I will not harm her or her friends should the opportunity arise after this cursed day is over.”

Well, I sure as hell wasn’t expecting her to declare us BFFs after everything that had happened. This was probably the best I was going to get out of her. I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s do this.”

After I gathered up the spilled traumas and sealed them back in their jars, I armed myself with my sword and shield and faced Miko, who was still on her knees in the grass.

“Okay, so…how do I enter your domain from here?” I asked.

“Easily enough.”

She put her hands at the base of her neck, right over the indentation where her sternum met her collarbones, and dug her fingers in. Blood spilled as her skin tore, and she quickly worked her nails across her clavicle, then down her sternum, down between her breasts, down her taut belly. As she tore herself open and pulled her skin away, she revealed not red muscle and bone but that utter blackness I’d seen before with my stone eye.

“Step inside.” She held her flayed skin wide as if it were merely a coat, and a gust of bitter wind blew from her core, as if it led to some ancient, frozen depth on a planet so far away from any sun that not so much as a rumor of light ever reached it. The blood dripping down the ragged edges of her skin steamed, froze.

I stared at the icy void within her, feeling my stomach churn. But this was nothing more than what I’d bargained for. There was no turning back now. There was no way out but to keep going through with the plan.

“All right.” I took a deep breath, held my sword and shield close, and jumped down inside Miko’s hell.

First came the spinning disorientation and blindness I’d come to expect, but it was cold, so cold, and my eyes and lungs were burning as if I were floating unprotected in deep space, and I felt as though I might be torn apart, when—

—a sensation like falling onto rotten pond ice, plunging down into dark frigid water. I gripped my sword and shield tightly; I couldn’t lose my grip on my only protection here—

I lay in the slagged wreckage, small and weak, my infant voice wailing in pain for the mother who’d expelled me from her rotting womb and abandoned me. The metal and brick and charred bones around me were hot with radiation, my flesh burning and healing over and over, the hunger in me far brighter than the sun trying to force its rays through the smoke-dark skies—