Darkness Raging Page 22

  Darynal popped in from the living room. He was dressed for hunting, it looked like, at least—Otherworld style. “I’m going to help. I don’t know your streets, but I’m useful in a fight.”

  I started to protest but stopped. We needed all the help we could get. And that meant I was calling Roman as soon as we were in the cars.

  “Fine. Shade and Darynal can ride with me. Camille, are we ready?”

  She nodded. “Let’s get a move on.”

  As Hanna opened the kitchen door to usher in Iris, Bruce, and the three babies, we headed for the front door, and all I could think about was how long I could stretch out the demons’ deaths, as soon as we had Nerissa home safe again.

  * * *

  The medical wing of the FH-CSI had grown over the past couple of years to encompass everything a hospital could do, only it was geared toward Fae and Supes. The front door to the building led to a long hall, with the police headquarters to the left, then we passed an elevator leading to the floors belowground, and then on into the medical wing.

  Mallen, an elf and the chief resident in charge ever since Sharah had been called home, was waiting for us. He held up his hand and picked up the phone.

  “Yugi? They’re here.” As he hung up, he motioned for us to follow him. “Chase was hurt badly, but he should make a full recovery, I think. The Shelakig’s poison hit deep, and he got it from both pincers and from the sting. Those creatures are like a fully loaded armored tank.”

  “How did you know what it was that attacked him?” Camille glanced over at me, her face lined with worry. We had almost lost Chase once before when he was helping us fight the demons. The man had proved his courage far more than once.

  “He managed to give us a description before he passed out. He was conscious when we got to him.” Mallen paused. “Menolly, you should know now that—before he fainted—Chase told us that they hadn’t hurt Nerissa.”

  My heart leaped and I could have kissed the elf right there. I nodded, trying to summon the courage to believe that she was still unharmed, wherever they had taken her.

  As he stopped in front of Room 200 and pushed open the door, the sound of machines jolted me back to the last time we had visited anyone here. I had said my good-byes to Chrysandra, a waitress who had become my friend as well as my employee, when she was killed during the burning of my bar. Wincing from the memories, I followed Mallen, and the others entered after me.

  Chase was in a bed, under sheets so white they blinded me. His face was pale and he was sweating. Four IVs fed into his arms, an oxygen mask was strapped to his face, and he had electrodes plastered on his chest. I noticed restraints on his wrists. A nurse watched over him closely. All of this told me our detective wasn’t out of the woods just yet, not with that close supervision. But his eyes were open and he struggled to sit up as we entered the room. The nurse put a stop to it by simply pushing him back against the bed with a stern look.

  “You stay put. The last thing you want to do is encourage that venom to move farther through your body. Until we have neutralized all of it, you’re not going anywhere.” Mallen pulled out a pen and glanced over his chart, then moved to examine the IVs.

  “What are you giving him?” I slowly eased closer to the bed. The beads of sweat on his forehead gave him a clammy look, and I realized he was far too pale for normal. Camille moved to where she was beside me, and as we stood there, the door opened and Delilah came in.

  “You’re here. I was getting something to drink.” She joined us, watching as Chase struggled with his breathing. He wheezed from beneath the oxygen mask.

  Mallen turned back to us. “A powerful cocktail of antivenins—we had to synthesize something that would work because the Shelakig’s venom doesn’t quite match anything we have available. But lucky for Chase here, one of our residents is skilled in magical alchemy and she was able to blend the antivenins against rattlesnake bite and a funnel web spider bite into a cocktail that seems to be working. But he’s had several convulsions and every time that happens, the venom spreads a little farther. We’ve got him on restraints so that when he does seize, he doesn’t hurt himself or thrash around too much.”

  The elf was calm as he spoke, but the look in his eyes told me that Chase was still in danger, and that Mallen wasn’t altogether certain of the treatment plan.

  “If he hadn’t taken the Nectar of Life and if it hadn’t had so much time to work through his body and effect the cellular changes that it has, I’m afraid we would be out one detective.” The elf paused. “You can talk to him, but only for a few minutes. I don’t want him excited, nor do I want him tired out any more than he already is.”

  I nodded. “We hear you.”

  Yugi scurried in at that point. “Before you talk to him, talk to me. That way you can conserve your questions and he won’t have to go over anything he already told us.” He motioned for us to follow him out the door and down the hall to a break room. I glanced back, reluctant to leave Chase alone, but the nurse and Mallen were there, and we could trust them.

  As we gathered around the long table, Yugi took the head chair. He motioned for us to sit down. “I know you’re in a hurry to get out there, to find Nerissa, but you need to know what happened before running off.”

  As much as my heart was screaming Get on with it, I forced myself to sit down and listen.

  “At two-twenty-five a call came in for Chase. The person said he had been attacked by a group of bikers and that he was sure it was a hate crime. He said his girlfriend had been with him and that she had been sexually accosted and needed help, but they didn’t feel comfortable going to the hospital—not even here. Chase asked him if it had been the Freedom’s Angels who attacked them, and the man said yes. So he wrote down their location and called Nerissa, since she’s our victim’s advocate, and told me he’d drop by to pick her up. He said that the FAs were up to their tricks again and that we may have to run a sting on them to get rid of them. He left here right after that.”

  Camille cleared her throat. “He got to our house at a little before three, because I happened to glance at the clock when Nerissa ran out the door. She said she had to go out with Chase on a call and that he was picking her up.”

  “That’s what Delilah told us. Chase called me at three twenty to tell me they were en route to . . .” Yugi consulted the file. “316 Chamber Hall Drive, which is a small private lane off California Way SW, out in West Seattle near Discovery Park.”

  The wheels were turning in Camille’s head; I could see it on her face. “Let me guess, there are no houses on Chamber Hall Drive?”

  “Right. It’s a relatively new street so there are no houses, yet. Developers are preparing to tear out the greenbelt, but they haven’t yet. They got there at three fifty—there was a lot of traffic. Chase radioed in that there weren’t any houses, and they were going to poke around a little in the wooded thatch. I called his cell twenty minutes later, worried when he hadn’t checked in. I sensed something was off. He managed to answer, but he sounded terrible. He said a giant scorpion had attacked him, and that some freak show one-legged creature had grabbed Nerissa. We immediately headed out there. By the time we arrived, Chase was going into convulsions. He managed to tell us she was alive and unharmed the last he saw of her, and that he had tried to stop them but the giant scorpion hit him hard with the stinger. Then he had a seizure and passed out.”

  “How did you know it was a Shelakig?” I leaned forward, trying not to picture the Naedaran manhandling my wife. She would have fought back. Had they hurt her after dragging her off?

  “There aren’t that many giant scorpions in the world who can deliver this load of venom. Besides, Shelakigs are known in Otherworld. I did some work down in the Southern Wastes while I was living there, learning about toxins and magically induced illnesses, and they had a few of them there.” Mallen shook his head. “I knew that—over here—the only way to fi
ght the toxin would be to mix antivenins. Luckily, there’s a medic I know at the local dispensary who was able to get his hands on both types and send me a few vials of each. We’ve got them on a fast drip into Chase’s body, but we can’t just overload him. I also have a countervenom spell going, but that can only handle so much of the toxin.”

  “Where did it sting him?”

  “That’s another stroke of luck. It managed to sting him in the leg. If it had been near his heart, he’d be dead. If it had been near his spine, he might be paralyzed.”

  And with that sobering thought, we quickly told Mallen about the Naedaran and the Varcont. “This was planned, it wasn’t happenstance.”

  “Like I said when I woke you up, they took her as a hostage. What better way to get what they want? And we know what they want.”

  Camille looked so pale I thought she was going to faint, and at first I wondered what was going on, but then the full scope hit me. The spirit seals. We knew they were going to demand the spirit seals—what else could they want? And if that was the case . . . there was no way in hell we could give them up. If Shadow Wing managed to collect all of them—and with the ones we had, he’d be terribly close—he could begin to reassemble them and bring the worlds back together, and that would not only devastate all three realms but give him and his demonic army full access to take over Earthside and Otherworld.

  Which meant we absolutely could not accede to his demands. And that meant . . . I forced myself to stop. I didn’t dare allow my thoughts to wander into dangerous territory. I choked back the panic that had begun to rise once more and brought my attention back to Yugi.

  “Is there anything else we should know before we go talk to Chase?” I caught Mallen’s gaze straight on. He looked at me, and in that moment, I realized that he knew exactly what we were facing—what I was facing.

  “No, I don’t think so. Except he’s a very lucky man. I think we can stem the flow of venom before it does any permanent damage. He’s had a rough go of it and he’s not fully out of the woods yet, but I believe we’ve reached a turning point. Please, don’t wear him out. Ask your questions judiciously.” And with that, he led us back to the hospital room.

  As we entered the room, Chase was sitting up—or rather, his bed was propping him up. He looked weak, utterly exhausted. The nurse was checking his leg, Sharpie in hand. The thigh was horribly swollen, purple with streaks of blue and black radiating out from a very large puncture wound in the lower thigh. A thick black circle surrounded the wound, and Chase grimaced, watching as she drew another, larger circle around the first.

  “The venom has radiated out again, but the rate appears to be slowing.” Mallen examined the wound. He pressed one side of the puncture wound and a stream of steaming yellow pus ejected from the puncture point, fountaining up and out. It smelled rancid, as though it had been festering for days instead of hours. Beside me, Camille and Delilah both let out a small groan and turned away.

  “I know, I’m a prize cow, aren’t I?” Chase’s voice was raspy and weak, but he tried to smile.

  “Shut up, Johnson. You just focus on getting better.” Even though I wanted to run over, to shake him and make him cough up any little clue that might lead us to Nerissa, my gratitude that he had tried to save her at risk of his own life outweighed my instinct.

  “I’m sorry,” he wheezed. “I tried so damned hard to make them let her go.”

  “You did what you could. Just tell us anything you can think of, that you didn’t tell Yugi, that might help us. Did they say anything? Did you hear anything—see anything at all?” Delilah pulled a stool over to sit by the bed. She and Chase had been an item for a while, and now they were blood-oath brother and sister.

  Chase struggled to catch his breath, then closed his eyes as the IVs silently dripped into his veins. After a moment, he said, “The one who caught hold of her—the one-eyed creature . . .”

  “The Naedaran?”

  At that point, Vanzir entered the room. He shook his head and slipped up to stand beside Camille and Smoky.

  “Yes, he said something in crude English. I know I heard him say something . . .” As he floated between waking and sleeping consciousness, it took everything I had not to urge him on in a frenzy of unhelpful cheerleading. A moment later, he opened his eyes again. “I remember. He said . . . Get her ready. The gate’s waiting, and the Saraktanas are going to guard her.”

  “Saraktanas? Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, that was it, because I thought it sounded so odd.”

  Vanzir let out a slow breath. “I know exactly what he’s talking about and it’s bad news, I’m afraid.”

  We all turned to him. “What does it mean?”

  “In the common demonic tongue, Saraktanas translates to ‘seal wearers.’ That verifies—with what I’ve learned in the Demon Underground—that they’ve taken her back to the Subterranean Realms.”

  And with that news, I lost it.

  * * *

  Red as blood, a crimson haze, was all I could see around me. The freaks had Nerissa and they were going to die. Period. Die in a bath of blood and fire and frenzied mauling. I wanted to rip out their throats, drink them down to the ground, and then grind them under my feet once they were drained. The hunger to hurt them grew as I swung around, grabbing the nearest chair and sending it against the far wall, where it landed in a tangle with a metal cart that currently stood empty. The clatter was enough to raise the dead, but it did nothing to soothe my anger, and I was about to send my fist through the wall when Chase moaned as he tried to sit straight up.

  But before he could manage it, Camille put all her force into her voice as her words reverberated through the room. “MENOLLY, STOP!”

  I froze, unable to continue as the fury began to diffuse and I shook my head, my ears still ringing with her voice. As I glanced over at the bed, Chase groaned, his face clammy. Instantly chagrined, I reined in my anger and retracted my fangs.

  There are very few ways to calm down a vampire who is in a frenzy, but Camille possessed what was known as the voice of control, a rare force able to yank a vampire out of bloodlust. Somehow, Chase had developed the ability after consuming the Nectar of Life, which seemed to have awakened his own gifts. Both of them had managed to stop me cold a couple of times in the past.

  Camille walked over to me. “Let’s go outside the room for a minute.” She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and led me out of the room, leaving Mallen to attend to Chase, and the others silent and pensive.

  She walked me to the waiting room. “Sit down. I’d say take a deep breath but that’s moot, so do whatever it is you do in place of it now.”

  I closed my eyes, searching for that sparkling light deep in my memories that I used for an anchor. When I had been turned, the OIA—or rather, the YIA; we had moved over to the OIA later on but the latter was a child agency of the former—had spent a year rehabilitating me rather than face the scandal that my father threatened them with. They had sent me into severe danger without backup, and they knew the risks but didn’t fully disclose them to me. The only thing that saved them from being brought up on charges was that my father held a lot of public respect, and he demanded they do what they could to fix the damage in return for not pursuing the matter. The fact that I was half-human also helped them. The Court would have been lackluster on their charges, given my heritage. But scandals breed even more scandals, and the YIA wanted to avoid any more publicity than they already got from me being turned.

  One of the tricks they had taught me was to hold on to an inner light—to use that as the touchstone and anchor for all that I once was, and all that I had now become. And the visualization worked. If I could find my way to that light and hold tight to it, I was able to keep my inner predator under control. It acted as a stronger anchor than just about anything I had ever tried.

  As I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, Camill
e gracefully sat down beside me. She didn’t try to stroke my back, or take my hand, for which I was grateful. I wasn’t a touchy-feely person—even before I had become a vampire I had been a little bit put off by people reaching out before I invited them to. But she just sat there, waiting.

  Finally, I was able to speak again. “They took her to the Sub-Realms, Camille. What the hell are we going to do? I know we can’t give them the spirit seals. I know that, but I want to kill them, drive them to dust. I want to hand over anything they want in order to set her free.”

  Camille cleared her throat, and I could tell she was choosing her words carefully. “Even if you gave them what they wanted, you know they wouldn’t keep their end of the bargain. And say . . . say they did keep their word. They’re demons, bent on taking over this world. Do you and Nerissa really want to be sitting at their side when they raze through in a mass of destruction? Because you know that if you give them the seals, you might as well just hand them the keys to the kingdom and say, Come on in, boys. The water’s fine.”

  I stared at my hands. I knew she was right. I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to do anything but rush off to try to save her, but in the end—Camille was correct. How could I hand over two worlds in exchange for one life? It wasn’t in my nature to mass-sacrifice others, and Nerissa would hate me if I did that.

  “I hate them. I want them dead. Painfully, slowly, executed.”

  Camille let out a long sigh. “I know, but we don’t even know how to reach them at this point. And maybe we should focus on just getting her out of there instead of on what we’re going to do to them. We aren’t monsters, Menolly, even though sometimes it feels like we’re forced to be. Once we free her, clean quick kills and out. Torturing them won’t do anything but take us down to their level.”

  I shook my head. “No, but be real. There’s a little sadist in all of us. Try as we might to deny it, you can’t tell me that there isn’t the smallest bit of satisfaction when you crush the spider you’re afraid of, or when your neighbor who has it so easy gets a speeding ticket. You’ve gloated over victory enough to know the feeling. And if you’re honest, you’ll be truthful about feeling just a little joy when Hyto was destroyed due to your command.