Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (6 page)

He could hear the three of them now as they talked in the living room, the sounds of their voices drawing him from his drug-induced sleep. Even though he remained in the bed, he opened his eyes, blinking blearily at the darkened bedroom.

“I keep telling you. Of course it’s him,” he heard Sam say. “You saw him, Bear, you looked him straight in the face. How can you say that?”

A thin line of dim illumination cut beneath the door, and as Jason’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw his hand dangled over the bedside, his fingertips brushing the cold hardwood floor. Here, the shadows seemed to mingle and pool together, coalescing into one broad black puddle that spread out in all sorts of misshapen directions to envelop the floor, fill the room. As he moved his hand, it seemed like some of the shadows moved with him, a patch of darkness slightly deeper than the rest, more viscous somehow. He spread his fingers and watched with dazed fascination as the shadowy counterparts against the floor splayed more widely to match. In fact, the fingertips of his shadow seemed to elongate before his very eyes, stretching to reach beneath the bedroom doorway and creep beyond the corridor beyond, sliding in thin, diaphanous streams toward the living room.

“But it’s impossible,” Bear said, and the farther those slim tentacles of shadow extended, the closer they drew to the living room, the more clearly it seemed Jason could hear them. “There’s no way he can be alive, not after what happened to him.”

“There could have been a mistake,” Sam insisted, and Jason had a mental image of her in his mind, as plainly as if he was standing among them: Sam flanked by Dean and Bear, all of them sitting in a tight circumference. Her brows were stubbornly crinkled again, and she shook her head. “Maybe he wasn’t dead.”

“Sam,” Dean began at this.

“Things like that happen,” she cut in. “You told me just last week about that someone who’d been pronounced dead on the operating table but started breathing again after fifteen minutes.”

“That was a fluke, Sam,” Dean countered, “a medical anomaly. It rarely happens.”

“It happened then,” she said. “Maybe it happened with Jason too.”

“And that man has been in a coma ever since,” Dean continued. “He suffered permanent brain injury. Which Jason—if this is Jason—should be suffering from too, because a bullet tore apart most of the temporal and frontal lobes of his brain.”

“You don’t know—” Sam began, and again, as if standing in the doorway watching, or seeing it on a movie screen from the sanctuary of a darkened theater, Jason watched Bear put his hand on her shoulder, quieting her.

“He
does
know that, Sammi,” he said, his expression kind. “He was there in the ER when they brought Jason in. And I know it too. I may not have seen the body, but I saw the autopsy report.” Holding his index finger and thumb up to mimic a pistol shape, he leveled his fingertip at Sam’s temple. “It said Jason took a shot in the head about like so, by a Remington 38-caliber hollow-point bullet that punctured his skull, then blew apart, turning his brain into hamburger.”

“Stop.” She slapped his hand away from her, folding her arms again, tightly across her chest.

“Just before that, he was shot in the chest,” Bear told her. “Puncturing his lung, clipping his heart and pretty much flooding his chest cavity with blood.”

“Stop, Bear.”

“So if he hadn’t died from the bullet to his brain, it’s a safe bet he would have from this other wound. He would have drowned on his own blood.”

“I said stop it,” she cried, tearful now. “Shut up. Just shut up, both of you. Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’ve got your hopes up,” Bear said. He leaned forward, taking her by the hand. “Sammi, can you really say that’s him in the bedroom? I mean, with one hundred percent certainty?”

“Of course I can,” Sam said, but her voice wavered.

“Then we’ll find out for sure.” Bear stood. “You got a ballpoint pen on you, Doc?”

Dean patted his pockets, found a Bic and looked puzzled as he handed it to the older man. “I’ll go in there right now, take his prints,” Bear said. “Jason Sullivan had an arrest record. Misdemeanor assault from the year before he was shot, when he punched out the Doc.” He nodded to indicate Dean.

“That wasn’t his fault,” Sam said with a frown. “Dean was drunk and being an ass.”

There was the understatement of the year. Dean had blundered into Sully’s late on Friday night, three sheets to the wind as the old saying goes. He’d apparently been laying on the Captain Morgan pretty hard and heavy, as Jason had judged from the stench of his breath. Jason had tried to lead Dean outside to a waiting cab, and Dean had taken the opportunity to smash the butt end of a beer bottle into the back of his head.

“I’m sorry,” Dean said to Sam in the apartment. “How many times do I have to say it? I’m sorry things got so carried away.”

After he’d struck Jason, leaving him dazed and bleeding, Jason had pivoted, eyes wide with surprise. The bottle had broken upon impact with his head, lacerating his scalp, and then Dean had leveled what was left, a jagged ring of razor-edged shards, at his face. Jason had punched him, a reflexive move, an instinctive response that had left Dean out cold on the floor, his front teeth knocked loose, his nose shattered.

“None of that matters,” Bear said. “Not now, not anymore. But it
does
mean Jason still has prints on file in AFIS.”

“There would be DNA still on record too,” Dean said. “From the autopsy. All you’d need is a strand of hair or an oral swab.”

“Yeah, and an explanation for the state crime lab as to why I need a DNA analysis,” Bear interjected, shaking his head. “This way’s easier.”

He started to walk toward the hallway, but Sam sprang to her feet, sidestepping around Dean and grabbing his arm. “Stop.” When Bear turned to her, his brows furrowed, she met his gaze. “Leave him alone, Bear. At least for tonight. Whoever he is, he’s hurt and scared. That much I believe. Somebody stabbed him. He didn’t make that up and it’s not some part of a con.”

“Sammi, we don’t know where he’s been or what he’s been into all this time,” Bear said. “He might have been beaten up by a dealer or his pimp—”

“He’s not on drugs and he’s not a prostitute,” Sam snapped. “He couldn’t be, he just…” Her voice warbled, nearly breaking. “Please, just leave him alone. Just for tonight. Let him sleep and do whatever you need to in the morning.”

Bear looked at her for a long moment; then Jason saw his posture soften in concession. He reached up, brushing his thick fingers against his niece’s cheek, wiping away her tears. “All right, Sammi. I’ll get his prints before I go to work in the morning. He won’t feel a thing, won’t even know I’m there. I promise.”

She nodded, her lips pressed together in a thin line. “Barton, stop growling,” she said, cutting her eyes toward the dog. “What’s the matter with you today?”

Barton had noticed the thin tendril of shadow that had made its way down the corridor from the bedroom. Now the dog stood squared off against it, hackles bristled once again. As Sam went to its side, grabbing its collar and giving it a rough, remonstrating little shake, Jason drew his hand back and the shadowy line likewise shrank in recoil, slipping down the hallway with liquid-mercury speed, back beneath the edge of the door. As it did, he could no longer see or hear the trio on the other side.

Not that he ever believed he really
could,
anyway.

Because that’s crazy,
he thought, closing his eyes, asleep again almost at once.
That’s absolutely nuts.
CHAPTER FIVE

Jason slept again but found no rest, tormented instead by dreams so vivid, they seemed more like memories, no matter how impossible that was.

When he opened his eyes, a barren landscape, like the surface of the moon, swam into focus around him; the bottom of a deep chasm framed on either side by steep, cragged cliffs. Overhead, the sky was a smooth and featureless plane of black. A pale luminescence with no visible point of origin draped about the terrain like moonlight. The air was heavy, icy and still. Jason’s breath framed his face in a hazy, iridescent cloud as he lifted his head, shoving his hands beneath him and struggling to sit up.

Where am I?

The cold penetrated his body almost immediately, seeping through flesh and underlying muscles to nestle deep into his bones. He was naked, his body vulnerable and exposed. He drew his arms around himself in a vain, instinctive attempt to stay warm.

“Welcome to the Netherworlde.”

Startled by the voice, Jason stumbled clumsily around. A man stood him him, tall and lean, with coal-black hair that hung down to the small of his back in a heavy, glossy sheath. His face was vaguely familiar to Jason, and he frowned in sudden, bewildered recognition.

Fucking, fighting, filling beer mugs and failure,
the man had said as he’d leaned over Jason in the hospital.
That’s all this boy has ever known. And yet, he’ll go on to an eternal reward likely greater than anything you’ll ever enjoy. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?

“Who are you?” Jason whispered.

The little hook to the man’s mouth lifted higher. “My name is Sitri,” he said, affecting a little bow. He was naked, his flesh as pale as marble, almost every square inch of his lean form covered in elaborate, intertwining tattoos. Some kind of grotesque worms, their O-shaped mouths ringed with sharp teeth, had been drawn twisting and tangling down the lengths of his legs. Gigantic spiders splayed their outstretched legs across the plain of his belly, the breadth of his chest. Scarabs followed meandering paths from his shoulders to his elbows. Scorpions and centipedes trailed from here to his wrists.

“What is this place?” Jason asked, shying hesitantly away. “How did I get here?”

“This is the Netherworlde,” the man, Sitri, replied, still smiling, his tone of voice patient, if not somewhat condescending. “I brought you here.”

Fucking, fighting, filling beer mugs and failure
.
That’s all this boy has ever known.

“Why?” Jason whispered.

Sitri’s smile stretched wide with a dark, wicked sort of glee. “Because you belong to me. This is your home now.”

All at once, the tattoos on his body began to move like something alive or in a cartoon. They slipped and slithered together, worms and spiders, scorpions and scarabs all scuttling about, tracing the contours of Sitri’s musculature, following the lines of his limbs.

Just a dream.
Jason shook his head, shying back from the man and his crawling, squirming tattoos.
This can’t be real. This is too fucked up. It has to be just a dream.

He stumbled into something low-slung and heavy behind him, something that moved at his clumsy impact, chattering moistly, as if scolding him. Whirling in surprise, Jason recoiled anew to realize they had been surrounded by a throng of hideous creatures. Some looked like massive oversized scorpion, with large claw-like appendages framing numerous tiny featureless black eyes, and heavy tail raised high above each, each taller than a grown man, each capped with a massive hooked stinger.

Others looked human, at least in basic form, their bodies emaciated, their skin discolored and mummified, like meat jerky. Their eyes had been gouged out to leave shriveled, blackened pits and the corners of their fang-rimmed sharklike mouths had been slit open to their ears, leaving ghoulish parodies of smiles.

What are those things?

“They’re called Goblins,” Sitri told him helpfully, as if he could read Jason’s mind, offering a nod toward the scorpions. “The others are called Hounds.” The tattooed worms had reached his face now and swarmed over the shelf of his chin and along his jawline to envelop his eyes, to grope for purchase along his temples and hairline. “And these are Wyrms. You’ve met one of them already.”

At this, Jason remembered the thing that had fallen out of his ear in the alley outside Sully’s during his fight with Nemamiah.

That’s one of you down. Now to send this meat sack of yours and that misbegotten demon back where you both belong
.

A sudden blinding pain cut through his ear, staggering him, and he felt a slithering dampness. He cried out hoarsely in terror and disgust, clutching at his head, then cried out again as it fell out of him, the thing Sitri had called a Wyrm, only this one was real, flesh and blood, not tattooed ink set to flesh. When it hit the ground, landing at his feet, it began to wriggle and thrash against the dirt, like a goldfish on a tabletop.

Its body was soft and flaccid, its eyeless head framed by four or five fingerlike extensions, almost like catfish whiskers, and further distinguished by the dime-sized maw of its mouth. Even in the dim light, Jason could see black gums and dozens, if not hundreds, of glittering, glinting, needlelike teeth.

Oh, Christ, was that thing was inside my ear?
he thought.
It
was
. Oh, God, it was inside me, inside my brain!

Blood streamed down the side of Jason’s face in the Wyrm’s wake, then spattered against the ground. The clattering sound of the Goblins’ claws grew even more frenzied at this, and the Hounds flailed their spindly, crooked arms in the air, uttering hoarse screeches like a chorus of disharmonic locusts.

“You ask me, you’d better run,” Sitri told Jason. With a nearly gentle smile, he knelt, holding out his hand to the Wyrm. Jason watched in mesmerized horror as the thing crawled toward him, wriggling onto his fingertips, then using its tentacles and teeth to chew and tear its way back beneath Sitri’s skin.

“Once they smell blood, they get insatiable,” Sitri remarked as the Wyrm burrowed into his palm, then moved, a pulsating bulge like an overripe cyst making its way to his wrist. “And impossible to control.” Glancing up, Sitri dropped him a friendly sort of wink. “Of course, no one asked me.”