Cursed: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 1) (15 page)

Before I could respond, she stood on her tip toes and pressed her lips against mine while her other hand wrapped around my back and pulled me into the kiss. Fireworks exploded behind my eyes. Warmth spread out across my body as her fingers kneaded desperately into my flesh.

As I reached out to touch her, she stepped backward, breaking our embrace and leaving me standing there dumbstruck. The feel of her lips on mine was so fresh, I had to fight with everything in me not to cross the distance between us and kiss her again.

“I never got the chance to thank you for saving me, Mr. Brennan.” A sly smile broke across her face as she took another step backward, allowing the moonlight to bathe her. “But if you survive, we can do even more.” She winked at me, and my breath caught in my throat and my heart hammered double time. “You’ll find I can be very thankful.”

Then, without another word, she walked across the room and pressed one pale hand against the darkened wall. The sound of compressed air firing cylinders filled my ears. I watched in amazement as the wall to my right slid sideways, revealing a rickety stairway that led down into the deep dark. Green torches flickered within, casting ominous, sickly shadows across Ricky’s face as she smiled at me one last time.

“Good luck,” she whispered, dropping her hand as she turned to leave.

“Come down there with me. We can do this together,” I said, reaching out toward her, but she slid lithely away so I wound up grasping only air.

“No. Van has bound me to him. My pack and I cannot stand directly against him. You’ll have to do this alone, but don’t worry, Sera is down there. Your princess isn’t in another castle.” With those words, she vanished in a blur of speed that sent my lapels flapping.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder if I should go after her. I knew I could, hell, I was pretty sure she wanted me to leave Sera behind to go after her. She would wrap me in her arms and we’d frolic all the way to the nearest motel room. If I did that, Sera would be lost to Vassago’s Cursed who I assumed was named Van. The same man who had snared Ricky and her wolves in his web. He had to pay.

Besides, if I succeeded in taking him down, I would get to “do more” with Ricky anyway. While I wasn’t a huge fan of delayed gratification, nor was I exactly one hundred percent sure what her thanks might entail, I’d be a pretty poor excuse for a man if I gave up on saving Sera to find out. I was Mac Brennan after all, and while I was starting to get a picture of who that was, something told me even the Mac Brennan of my past would kill the villain and save the girl.

“Wipe that stupid smirk off your face,” I told myself, rubbing my temples with my fingers before taking a step toward the stairs. The distinct feeling I was stepping into a viper’s den settled around my shoulders like a well-worn cloak. “The doorway into Hell beckons.”

Part of me wondered what would lie ahead. I doubted Van expected me to get past Ricky. Hell, I very nearly hadn’t. It was only dumb luck that I’d happened to save her and her brother when I was just a stupid kid, albeit a violent, rage-filled kid. It seemed insane to imagine that I’d actually done those things. I’d planned on killing her brother and it was only a fluke that made me a hero instead of a villain. The realization made my blood run cold. Even over the course of this day, I’d killed more people than I cared to admit. It made me wonder if I was better off not remembering my past. No one good could kill that many people and feel nothing.

I sighed. Either way, no good would come from dwelling on it now. If I didn’t focus, I was going to get dead fast. I had no idea what was beyond that door, but I found it hard to believe I was about to just walk into his inner sanctum unmolested. I needed to be ready for anything.

With that happy thought, I moved into the stairwell. The air temperature dropped with every step I took so that by the time I was a couple floors down, I was breathing mist. My teeth chattered together despite my best effort to keep my noise to a minimum.

The sound of things slithering in the darkness set my nerves on edge, but the tunnel wasn’t much bigger than I was, and while it wasn’t exactly well lit, it was still lined with torches that cast emerald light into most nooks and crannies. If there was something slithering, it had to be far below me or within the rock surrounding me. Neither case boded well. I resolved to take things one at a time. If giant demonic slugs burst from the woodwork and tried to melt my face with eye lasers, I would be ready, but there was no sense getting worked up about it now.

I stopped, taking a moment to wipe my clammy palms on my jeans before moving forward. My shoe plunged through the rotten wood, and as I tried to reach out and grab hold of the banister, I teetered and fell flat on my back. The stairs beneath me broke, and I found myself careening through the darkness in a hail of debris. After what felt like forever, but was probably only a second or two, I plunged into a warm, thick river of slime, though from my screaming someone probably thought a little girl had fallen to her death.

The dark river swept me forward, the current so strong it was all I could do to keep my head above sea level as I was thrown into the concrete on all sides. I was definitely in some kind of weird sewer system that smelled like rusty nails and old pennies. Thankfully, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, only it was made up of green flames.

I threw my arms up in front of me as the river surged forward at Mach speed. Red light streamed from my tattoos as I grabbed at the stone next to me. My fingers clawed gouges in the cement walls before I was torn free by the current and thrown head over heels into the fire. I burst through it like the Fonz doing a bad motorcycle trick and smacked into the cement floor with a thwack that loosened all my teeth, even the big ones in back.

The surrounding concrete was smeared in blood, some of it was old and dried and some was fresh and glistening in the green firelight along the river behind me. Skeletons lined the wall to my left, some shackled in thick iron manacles while others had been tacked up in poses that made me hope they were already dead when it’d happened. If not… ugh…

A person dressed in one of those stars and moons robes I had seen in Jack’s bar oh so long ago, turned from his perch on a bone white podium and looked at me. His face was covered in purple tattoos and even though his pierced lips were set in a grim expression usually reserved for people about to disembowel puppies, I shot him my best smile.

“Ayyy,” I said, giving him a thumbs up from my position on the floor. He must not have been a fan of Mr. Fonzarelli because his first reaction was to try to gut me with the giant wavy dagger in his hand.

I rolled sideways as his blade struck the cement floor hard enough to throw up sparks. I scrambled to my feet as he came forward like the goddamned Terminator, and I knew I only had a second before he was on me. That didn’t worry me nearly as much as the half-dozen guys standing behind him pointing similar knives at me.

Chapter 19

There were so many of them I wasn’t sure I could take them all on. It wouldn’t take much for one of them to get lucky one time. That’s all it would take to permanently end my fledgling career as a hero. That said, I wasn’t about to go out without a fight. My name was Mac Brennan, and I didn’t give a damn about going quietly into the good night.

“How about we all just take a minute and talk about this?” I said, holding my hands out in front of me in the universal sign for “please don’t stab me, you crazy cultists” as I tried to buy myself time to think of a proper plan.

In response, the one who had tried to stab me opened his mouth wide, revealing a nub where his tongue should have been. His jaws snapped shut, and he tapped his lips with his knife.

“So I’m guessing you aren’t much for conversation,” I replied as a pit opened in my stomach. Here I was standing in front of a bunch of dudes crazy enough to have their tongues all cut out, and I was trying to reason with them? Nope. It was time to go with plan B. Kill them all and let God, Satan, or whoever these guys worshiped sort them out.

The lead one slashed at me. I dodged and drove my right fist into his nose. Crimson light spilled off my tattoos as my knuckles met his face with so much force his head evaporated. Blood fountained up out of his neck as the rest of his body toppled forward onto the floor to collapse into a pool of slowly spreading crimson.

I casually bent down and picked up the knife while I tried to figure out how I’d literally obliterated a man’s skull with one punch. By the time I’d stood back up, the remaining cultists were closer, spread out in a wide semicircle around me.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume me literally crushing a man’s skull with one punch means little to you all,” I said, gesturing at the fallen man with my new curvy knife.

They rushed me, which was sort of expected. I sidestepped the first one while stabbing my knife into the throat of another as I slipped past them and booked it down the hallway behind them. Footsteps followed me down the narrow stone hallway which was exactly what I wanted. A huge wooden door braced in black steel was visible only a few meters away. Sliding my bloody knife into the waistband of my pants, I spun around and splayed my right hand in front of me.

“Ignis!” I shouted and like before, fire ripped up from my palm. Scarlet light burst from my tattoos, filling the tiny corridor with hellish shadows as I unleashed a gout of hellfire that blasted into the onrushing cultists like they’d been sprayed with napalm.

They flailed and clawed at the fire as it ate across their flesh and robes alike, reducing them to twitching masses of blackened flesh in the time it took me to blink three times. The surrounding stone was red hot, and even from here, the air was almost too hot for me to breathe. Bile rose up in my throat as I turned away from them and stared at the door. Even though the cultists had been bad guys, I wasn’t sure anyone deserved to die a death like that. Hell, they hadn’t even been able to scream.

“It all comes down to life choices,” the feline in my mind whispered, and I got the distinct impression she was rubbing her cat paw across my brain. “Sometimes people choose to do good, other times bad, but what is important is the choice.”

“Still,” I whispered and because I couldn’t think of a better reason, said the word again. “Still.”

“Indeed,” the cat replied, and that seemed to be enough because a strange calmness descended over me as she receded back into the recesses of my mind, leaving me with the haunting revelation that one day very soon I might wind up burning to my death over and over again from now until eternity.

A chill crawled up my spine on icy fingernails as I turned my attention back toward the door. I must have moved the rest of the way across the hallway without realizing it because the door loomed in front of me like the last gate before a dragon’s hoard. I reached out toward it as though drawn by a magnetic force, and as my fingers brushed against the polished bronze handle, an electric spark leapt up my arm. My tattoos blazed to life like a neon sign outside a strip club.

My fingers clenched around the handle, and before I could stop myself, I’d jerked the wooden door open. It was surprisingly easy to do since, despite its immense size, the door seemed to weigh little more than a plastic bag. The room beyond was completely unlike I expected because it looked like the man cave I’d always wanted, you know, assuming I could remember wanting one.

The floor was covered in that weird gray paint with the flecks of white and blue in it I’d seen on the floor of machine shops, and the far wall was completely filled by a ginormous television playing the scene from Field of Dreams where Ray asks his father if he wants to have a game of catch in an endless loop. Baseball memorabilia, autographed by everyone from Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio to Mike Trout lined the other walls.

A bar reminiscent of the one I’d seen in Jack’s stood along the left wall, but where that one had been polished oak, this one sparkled with dark obsidian. A man about five feet tall with a shaved head and a pirate goatee stood behind the bar, eyeing me with cool cholera-green eyes.

“Care for a game?” he asked in a voice that was like the scratches outside my window late at night. He waved toward the room, and I followed his gesture to see everything from foosball to backgammon. Every single game, machine, or table was immaculate and done in that same emerald-flecked obsidian style. It was a little weird because I hadn’t remembered seeing the machines before. Had they just appeared?

“Where the hell am I?” I asked, apprehension leaking into my voice.

“You’re in my game room,” the man replied, wiping his pale hands on his emerald bowling shirt before snatching something from behind the bar. He placed a Pabst Blue Ribbon on the bar and pushed it toward the empty stool in front of him. “You might as well make yourself comfortable. You’re going to be here a while.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, a strange high-pitched squeak that reminded me of a dying mouse left my lips. I swallowed and tried again. Same thing. Cold sweat began to trickle down the back of my neck as the still smiling guy leveled an unblinking stare at me.

After several seconds, he shook his head and opened the tall can on the bar before setting it back down. “There, I even opened it for you. I happen to know this is your favorite brew, so you might as well come and drink it. I’d hate to see it go to waste.” He quirked a mocking grin at me. “After all, beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

“Wait, you know my favorite beer? And it’s Pabst of all things? Seriously?” I asked before clamping my hands over my mouth in shock. I’d spoken, so why couldn’t I do it before?

The man’s eyes sparkled as he patted the bar with one stubby hand. “I know everything there is to know about you, Mac. I’ll even tell you since I’m in a rather giving mood.” He gestured toward the stool again, but I was too stunned to do more than stand there and gape at him. “Stay awhile and listen.” An evil glint flashed through his eyes. “It isn’t like you have much of a choice anyway.”