“You could try. But Bennie’s enchantments aren’t easily removed. It’s true you might find someone who’ll hit on the right formula to remove the spell eventually, but it could take some time. Easily a week.”
“Oh, much more than that, I think,” Devona said. “He might still be looking this time next year.”
Morfran’s shell had gone completely black now. I wondered if it was a sign of anger, or maybe fear. Whichever, it was clear we were getting to him.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly, with an edge of desperation. “The people I work for would be most displeased if I told you anything.”
“By ‘people’ you mean the Dominari, right? I sympathize with you, Morfran old bug, but all I can tell you is to ask yourself which is worse: talking to us and maybe having the Dominari find out, or going the rest of this year’s mating season desperately needing to have sex, but without any lead in your pencil.”
Morfran regarded me for a moment, his head tilting back and forth slowly this time. Finally, he let out an edgy buzz of a sigh that already sounded tinged with the beginnings of sexual tension and frustration. “Very well. What do you wish to know?”
We asked the demon some questions, and he answered them clearly, quickly, and concisely. I was fairly certain that he had nothing directly to do with Varma’s death-it was clear the Red Tide vampires had been responsible for that-and so when we were finished, I had Lourdes bring over the antidote. Morfran practically inhaled the potion, and then scuttled off back to the more carnal sections of Bennie’s establishment, no doubt intending to make sure the antidote worked as advertised.
And so Devona and I said goodbye to Lyra, who I wished well in her new profession, and Devona alone (as she insisted) thanked Lourdes. Bennie gave us both kisses on the cheek-despite the nasty condition of mine, Dis bless her/him-and we left the House of Dark Delights to follow up on what we had learned from Morfran.
We headed for Skully’s.
TWENTY
The bar was still busy as hell, and there were a few new suspicious-looking stains on the floor since the last time I’d been here, but the atmosphere seemed calm enough now. But considering why Devona and I had come back, I doubted it was going to stay that way for long.
The juke box was singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” when Devona and I walked in, but as soon as the trio of heads caught sight of me, they stopped. The middle one said, “Not you again!” and all three shut their mouths tight and closed their eyes, as if they were little children who thought they could make me vanish by pretending I didn’t exist. I noticed none of the patrons complained about the performance being interrupted.
Devona and I walked over to the bar and took a pair of stools suddenly vacated by a couple lykes in human form who wrinkled their noses in disgust as they left.
“What did you expect, roses?” I muttered as they walked off.
Skully was busy at the other end of the bar filling a mug of beer for the pierced warlock I’d seen the last time I was in here. The Arcane man still seemed somewhat familiar to me, and while he waited for his beer, I studied his face, but I still couldn’t place him. When Skully handed him his beer, the warlock noticed my scrutiny, but instead of looking upset, he merely gave me a nod and walked over to sit at the same table he’d been at when I’d fought Honani earlier. I wondered if he’d been sitting there alone drinking the entire time I’d been gone. Maybe he was just a solitary type who wanted a relatively quiet place to hide out from the Descension Day madness. Still, there was something about the man that bothered me…
My thoughts were interrupted as Skully came down to our end of the bar.
“Hey, Matt! I’m surprised to see you back so soon-and with your arm reattached, I see. Business?” He nodded to Devona, and from the tone in his voice he would have smiled if he’d possessed the lips and facial muscles to do so. “Or pleasure? Wait, let me guess. Has to be business, as bad as you look. You shouldn’t be in here: you should be over at Papa Chatha’s getting some more work done.”
“This is my new friend Devona. Her father lost something-something very important-and I’m helping her look for it.”
“Oh?”
“Her father’s name is Galm, and the object is called the Dawnstone. Sound familiar?”
Skully shook his fleshless head. “No, should it?”
“Yes, because according to my source”-who was at that very moment most likely expending a great deal of fluid, as he’d put it-“you’re responsible for its disappearance from the Cathedral. Or at least your bosses the Dominari are.”
Then something happened which I’d never seen before. Tiny pinpricks of crimson light began to blaze deep in the cold darkness of Skully’s eye sockets. “I think maybe you’d better leave, Matt, and take your new friend with you.”
He started to turn away, but I grabbed his pudgy, hairy wrist and stopped him. “I know there’s a Dominari-run lab upstairs, Skully. A lab that’s been awfully busy lately cranking out veinburn.”
Skully yanked his arm away. “Your mind has finally rotted through, Matt, you know that? All that’s upstairs are my quarters and some extra storage space.”
Skully and I looked over the bar at each other for a moment. I knew his silver broadaxe wasn’t far from his reach.
“If that’s true, then you won’t have objection to my taking a look, now will you?” And before Skully could respond, I jumped off my stool and ran-limped as fast as I could toward the iron door located the right of the bar.
Head aside, Skully has a fully fleshed body. A little too fully fleshed, and I thought given my current state, we’d be evenly matched with it came to speed. But even with his bulk, Skully was able to grab his axe from behind the counter and leap over the bar and come after me before I made it halfway to the stairs.
He shouted my name, and I turned in time to see him raise his axe over his head, the silver glinting even in the bar’s dim light. “Don’t make me hurt you, Matt. Please.”
Everyone in the bar watched us play out our little drama, not only to see what would happen next but also to help them decide if they should bother taking cover. But no one observed us more intensely than the pierced warlock.
Where the hell do I know that sonofabitch from? I thought.
“If you really don’t want to hurt me, Skully I have a suggestion: put the axe down.”
“I can’t do that, Matt,” he said sadly.
The irony inherent in the situation was so thick you could cut it with Skully’s axe. It was like a replay of earlier in the day, only instead of a murdering lyke, I now faced a friend. A friend who was about to bring a very large, very sharp weapon down on my head, but a friend nonetheless.
“I can’t let this one go,” I said. “It’s too important.”
“And I can’t let you reach those stairs.”
Stalemate. I had little in the way of surprises left in my pockets, and nothing that would take care of Skully. Hell, I wasn’t even exactly sure what sort of creature he was, and I didn’t have the first clue as to what sort of weaknesses he might possess.
“So what do we do now, Matt?” he asked.
“I figure you can just stand there, and I’ll watch as Devona cracks you over your bony noggin with a chair.”
“Come off it, I’m not going to fall for-” The chair connected with his skull with a sharp crack! and a shower of splintered wood. Skully dropped his axe, which hit the concrete floor with a loud clang, and a second later, Skully himself crashed down beside it.
I quickly examined him. He had a tiny jagged fissure in his skull, and the lights in his socket had been extinguished.
Devona held only a pair of chair legs in her hands now, and she let them clatter to the floor. “Is he unconscious?”