Red Moon Demon (Demon Lord) (32 page)

THIRTY-TWO

“
It never fails
;
put on an
apocalypse

suit, and an apocalypse happens
.
”

—
Caine Deathwalker

Something about my expression compelled Salem to cancel his drifting and turn.
He went rigid with shock.
A heartbeat later, a
spinning
ring of
red plasma
enclosed us both
, ghosting up from the roof, reaching my knees. The writhing fire was colder than the night. Salem’s head tilted downward. He turned my way once more, gaze following the ring, then sliding to me
.
There
was a look on his face as if I’
d profoundly surprised him.

Hand touching the amulet,
Salem
darted away, but only made it as far as the ring. An unseen wall in the air stopped him
, bouncing him back
.
He
returned to my
reality, losing the green glow,
and was
tinted red by the moon
,
and
the
blood ring
around us
.

“So, what now?” he asked.

“Now the fun starts
,
Salem
.
”

“How did you do this
? T
his is not your kind of magic
.
”

I moved the sword, roll
ing
my arm
in a what-can-I-say gesture
.

H
i
s eyes
followed the motion. They widened, as if he could see the new tat under my
sleeve
. “
What is
that…
?
”

The concrete inside the ring turned blood red, spilling crimson radiance into the air. It was like a piece of the blood moon had materialized under us. Why now?
I think I knew. Salem had just shed his altered state. The ring could now sense two souls. That was the key. My mind flashed to Mad Max at Thunder Dome.:
Two men enter. One leaves
.

The blood light hardened. We were bugs in
red
amber
, but the
wind-blown
grit had no trouble
reaching
us
. Soon, the glow was so thick we were only shadows to each other, haunting a private
hell
. He screamed something I couldn’t understand
as g
ravity flickered. Finally, I
was
seized and
thrown
by a monstrous force.

Blinded by dust,
whirled madly by hurricane winds,
I lost the sword
. W
rapp
ing
my arms
o
ver my
face
,
I
protect
ed
my eyes
, and
f
ilter
ed
the clogg
ed
air
so
I
could
breath
e
.

Something that felt like a sand dune caught me
, whacking my breath out of me
. I rolled up
the bank
and then back down, as the wind slacked from
killing force
to
just
pissed off
.
Squinting, I shook myself and
put my back to the wind,
feeling for the mirror on my chest.

Good, still there
.

Something else
felt wrong
.
My right forearm felt cold. I unzipped the suit enough to pull my arm out and take a look. The tattoo was gone. I stuffed the arm back into the suit, and looked round. I found t
he lotus I’d stolen
from the fey treasure room, it was restored, a hunk of crystal half buried in the dust. Com
ing to this dimension had broken the bonding.

It will p
robably
happen every time I come here.
T
he crystal
needs to be functional
to catch
a
soul
and
fuel my return.
I picked up the crystal lotus and stuffed it inside
my suit
. With the relic there, I wasn’t able to zip back up
,
and would gather dust in my clothes, but I needed to keep my hands free
, the downside of survival
.

I
noticed I wasn’t staying
put
. My knees were
digging shallow furrows in the dust
; a weird kind of
sideways gravity
pulled me.
I
rolled to my feet, and the
soles of my feet
cut the furrows then. My weight felt low as
I
moved with no effort on my part, like a passenger in an invisible car.

I’d lost Salem in the murk of
grit
.
He might be miles away or on the other side of any of these dunes. H
is feet
could be sliding nearby
like mine
and I’d never know, with the
sibilance playing games with
my senses.

I heated a tat, striving to activate my heightened senses, and a spike of pleasure went through me better than any sex I’d ever had. My feet became heavy, digging grooves in the crimson dust, dirtying the air even more. My whole body expanded, lifting my upper torso out of the billows. My magic worked in this pocket dimension, but not
as
expected. I needed to be c
areful about any spell I used.

Above the
du
st, I found a bloody bowl of sky with a few bright red stars gleaming through. In the middle of the sky, as seen in NASA photos taken by astronauts on the moon, I saw the bright blaze of the Earth, a blue white swirl of cloud and ocean, and brown-green continents, hanging out of reach. Only the moon I was on was not the same Luna. This was the moon of a parallel universe, or maybe the sub-space dream of a god. This moon had atmosphere and—ruins.

Saving my magic, I released the heightened senses I’d invoked, and sank into the billows, my normal s
ize once more
.

Lumbering along in a jet stream, without effort, I drifted past half shattered buildings made of octagonal, obsidian bricks.
The wind swelled, moaning as it grated across the dark surfaces. I passed a
tower
resembling
a
pig-pong ball
on a skewer.
Then a
divided pyramid occupied two sides of a courtyard where the
dust
clouds flattened
the appearance of gargantuan statues into amorphous shadows. These
frozen warriors
awaited
the thaw of battle
s that would never come
.
I went on to where slanting obelisks stabbed the sky like accusing fingers.

Curious,
I tried an experiment, angling myself, pushing against the dust to add a bit of resistance to the relentless drag of the horizontal gravity. I was still pulled with the billows across the ruins, but I was able to tell there was a local source to the attraction
.

I’m being taken somewhere on purpose.

I wanted to resist on general principle, but I figured Salem would eventually show up where I was going, and if I wanted to get there first—to get the lay of the land and prepare an ambush—I needed to run. I started moving my legs. The dust made footing treacherous, but running into the drag made it easier to breath.

I crossed an expanse of dunes and reached the hard red face of a bluff. I jumped against it and ran up what my eyes insisted was now ground, not wall. At the top, it felt like falling when I reoriented. The filter of hissing grit almost hid the sound of grating stone as a slab swung up in front of me. What poked its head in my path was more mantis than trapdoor spider, with its long, green chitin, oversized eyes, and meat-hook claws. The size of a German shepherd, it tilted its head to study me as if humans were a fabulous, mythical thing it had never expected to meet.

I wondered what
its
usual pr
e
y was.

Making the best of things, it leaped to meet me, pushing off the upright door, against the sideways gravity. I had an impression of a grasshopper’s oversized hind legs, as I fell flat to the ground
,
I
hit the releases that popped the bayonets from my forearm sheathes.
I slid feet first into the drag until I stood on the raised trap door. The bug’s claws missed, but my
bayonets
didn’t
.
I
grooved
the entire length of it, head to pelvis
, but I don’t think the injuries were fatal
.

It screamed, thrashing in shock. Before the weird gravity could bring it back on top of me, I threw myself to the side and rolled into the drag. Bumping up a dune, I went a little airborne and managed to get my feet under me so I no longer felt like I was dropping. I knew I was still falling, if sideways, but the
normal
orientati
on was a psychological comfort.

Keeping an eye out for more opening trapdoors, I continued. The pull increased, as if whatever caused it was getting impatient to see me. The thickening
gruel of air
acquired a diagonal motion that tugged me out of line with the drag. I activated my magical senses once more and nearly came in my pants as the pleasure center of my brain was tickled. It was a hell of a cost I was paying for magic. This reality—to use the term loosely—could become addictive.

Expanding, I almost didn’t fit the giant gate that appeared before me, set between two fanglike pillars. Resisting winds that now moved in from the side, I realized that I’d reached the edge of a vortex that would only get harder, more impenetrable with every step. However, if I could punch through to the eye of the storm, I should find tranquility and maybe normal gravity once more.

I charged all out, feeling a delicious thrill as I activated the tat on my leg that amplified my speed. I got ahead of the jet stream, but my course went diagonal. Still, progress was progress. The air was a red smear now. I ran blind, until bursting through a curtain, I found crystal clarity and a retu
rn of gravity from the ground.

The suddenness of it tripped me up. I sprawl
ed
face
down
, my heightened senses peeling away like layers off an onion. Spitting, I lifted my face from the dust and looked a few yards ahead at delicate bare feet with petite ankles. I raised my head and followed the view up milky
legs to a diaphanous wrap hugging
a woman’s full, sweet curves. My gaze slid past thinly veiled breasts to a heart-shaped face framed by blood red hair. Her lips were stained the same color, and her eyes continued the motif, deep crystal red pools where shadows swam like sharks, ever in motion.

She stared down at me much the way the trapdoor bug had done.

“Am I on the menu?” My words seemed loud to me in this quiet pocket where the
du
st no longer scraped
and hissed.

Her full lips parted, daubed a moment by the tip of her tongue. She said, “Do you want to be
?
”

English, great! But wait a second. Did she already know it, or did she just pull the knowledge straight out of my head?

“Straight out of your head,” she said.

“That’s fine,” I said, “but you don’t want to rummage around in there too much. You might get scared.”

“Scared?” Her voice verged on laughter. “I am a goddess.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I slowly pushed myself off the ground,
rechambering my bayonets
.
I scanned our surroundings, hoping I’d beaten Salem here. The lady and I stood near the edge of an obsidian jungle. Broad palms, dangling orchids and vines, cross-hatched boles of trees; they all looked like they’d been carved from volcanic glass by a master craftsman. I heard the murmur of a small waterfall not too far away.

Her gaze caressed my
holstered
weapons. “Are you afraid of me?”

“Hell, yes! I’m not stupid.”

Her well-formed body—only a tiny
h
i
n
t of her
true
essence—was a severe temptation I needed to fight.
This lady had formed this dimension with a stray thought. Such powers hadn’t walked the earth since the dawn of civilization.
Her awareness of me p
os
ed a
worse
threat
than the warlock I hunted. Speaking of which…