I'd never doubted Cassandra's abilities. Charlatans don't stay in the biz long when vamps join their clientele. But even if I had come into this thinking Cassandra's upstairs gig was a fraud, her reaction to the symbols would've convinced me otherwise. She dropped the note onto the table in front of her as if she'd been burned. Her face tightened into a mask of fear and the soul behind her eyes cringed like a spectator at the Holocaust Museum.
"Where did you see these?" she asked, pointing a wavering finger at the symbols but making sure she didn't touch them.
"They had been carved into a dead body," Cole told her, "actually, two dead bodies on two separate occasions."
Cassandra fingered a crucifix at her neck and muttered under her breath in, well, oddly enough it sounded like Latin.
"What are you saying?" Cole asked.
She looked at him grimly. "A prayer for your protection."
Cole said, "Why do we need God's protection in this, Cassandra?"
"These symbols," she said, "are powerful runes designed to trap the soul, after death, to keep it from ascending."
I recalled the scene in the restaurant, when Harry's beautiful blue soul went flying into the wild blue yonder. What if it had remained stuck there, straining to be free? The image made me flinch.
Cole shook his head. "How is that possible?" he asked.
Cassandra made a visible effort to pull herself together. "When people die violently, their souls do not immediately break free," she explained. "During that short delay the soul can be contained inside the body by branding these runes on the skin around the death wound."
"So," ugh, leant believe I'm saying this, "then what do you have? Zombies?"
"That is a possibility." Cassandra looked as revolted as I felt. "Another explanation is that a rail, or hell-servant, trapped the soul until his master could arrive to eat it."
I couldn't help it, my mind suddenly supplied a picture of a red-skinned, horned demon picking its teeth with a purple claw as a waiter cleared the dishes from its table.
"How was the soul?" the waiter asked.
"Not bad with butter and lemon," the demon replied. "In fact, I'd have to say it was finger lickin' good."
I know, I know, not funny.
"Aside from the obvious biblical explanations," I said, "why would a demon eat souls?"
Cassandra shuddered. "For the fun of it," she suggested, "or perhaps because it had been called to do so by a vengeance-minded human who was willing to pay the price."
Great, that's what I need right now. It's not enough that I have to stop a mega-terrorist from spreading some godawful virus. Now I get to chase down a psychotic netherworlder with the munchies too.
"There is a third possibility," Cassandra said.
"What is it?"
"Demons are not the only monsters who eat souls. My people tell a story of how, once, an evil emperor named Tequet Dirani made it his passion to rule, not only this world, but all the worlds beyond this one. He summoned a Kyron to help him."
"What's a Kyron?" asked Cole.
Cassandra started to look ill as she described something that sounded more like a George Lucas creation than the real deal. "It is a beast built for destruction. Its presence can herald a plague or a nuclear meltdown. And it can rip through the walls that divide universes like a wrecking ball."
"Sure sounds like a demon to me," Cole murmured.
"Not at all. It will destroy in any cause, good or evil. It is, like the djinn, at the mercy of its master's whim."
"Only genies don't scarf down somebody's essence every morning for breakfast," I pointed out. "So how do you master something like that?" I wondered. "How do you beat it?"
Cassandra didn't realize I was waxing rhetorical.
"You control it with food," she said. "Souls, to be specific. Likewise, you might be able to beat it by starving it."
"Is that how the emperor's Kyron died?"
"Oh, Kyron don't die," Cassandra said earnestly, "they simply become weak enough to bind."
Somehow I didn't think she meant bind as in 'Yo, Henry, go find me some rope.'
"Bind how?" I asked, feeling suddenly exhausted. I eyed one of the couches speculatively. How offended would Cassandra be if a perfect stranger collapsed there for, oh, say three days, more or less?
"According to the legend, a powerful mage bound the Kyron by making her forget her own name."
"That must have been a major bump on the head."
"Indeed," Cassandra agreed. "It would take more than a mild concussion to forget the name Tor-al-Degan."
Chapter Sixteen
H—Holy crap! Cole and I exchanged dumbstruck looks while Cassandra puzzled out our shock. Before she could put her questions into words, however, Bergman slunk into the room.
"What?" he asked, immediately suspicious as we stared at him, some of us dazed, some confused, none quite able to muster a common pleasantry.
"We've had a kind of a shock," I finally managed. Talk about understatement. That was like saying Vesuvius' eruption was a slight blip in Pompeii's weather pattern. If we weren't so damn civilized we'd be on our knees, kissing our asses goodbye.
Bergman looked around the room furtively. If you didn't know him, you'd suspect he'd caused our consternation. He just carried that air of guilt with him wherever he went.
"I'll fill you in later," I said, pretending this powerful fist of foreboding hadn't just sucker-punched me in the gut. "We've, uh, that is… we've found out what we needed to know so, now that you're here, we'll get out of Cassandra's hair."
I stood up, digging in my pocket for a twenty.
"No, please," said Cassandra, "there's no charge."
"My boss blesses you," I said. I leaned across the table and held out my hand, my Military Brat Politeness Training temporarily overcoming common sense. "Thanks for your help. You've been a godsend."
She shook my hand, barely squeezing in response to my firm grip. Then her focus shifted, and I knew I was screwed. I tried to pull my hand back before she could connect with spirits I wasn't ready to face. But her vision had nothing to do with worlds beyond death.
"David is in danger," she said tightly. "You must tell him to stay away from the house with the pink door. It is rigged to blow."
She dropped my hand and sat back in her chair, looking like somebody who's just debarked from an intense roller coaster ride. She murmured something that sounded like, "Who are you?" But I could barely hear her beyond the roaring in my ears. It was as if the explosion had already happened inside my head. The blackness stormed over me like a level five twister, a miles-wide black-on-black runaway train I could never hope to resist.
But I tried. For David's sake I fought to stand, to simply stay upright and functional while my own wild-eyed psyche tried to bowl me over. This time it worked. The force that had, for so long, squashed my awareness and pushed it down into unconsciousness, now tugged at me, pulled me forward so fast I felt dizzy with the rush. I felt supercharged, as if I could see everywhere all at once, be anywhere I wanted to go, do whatever I wished. The way I figured it, this was no time to kick Tinkerbelle in the teeth. I wished to be with David, wished hard, like when we were kids and Tammy Shobeson had me down in the dirt, demanding that I call myself and my snake eating, son-of-a-bitching dad a dirty, rotten coward.
There was a moment when the blackness seemed to offer up a navigational beacon, my own personal yellow brick road on which to set a new land-speed record. Later I would gain the knowledge I needed to slow that trip down, put it into some kind of perspective. But now it seemed instant, a Jell-O Pudding trek that put me where I needed to be, in the middle of Desert Nowhere in the dark, in the heat, slamming into my brother, through him, screaming, "David! David! David!," in a voice so loud and shrill I expected some unseen enemy to lob a grenade my way just to shut me up.