Last Rites (Darkling Mage 6)

Izanami’s death’s head of a face smiled at me with its rictus grin, what little hair she had gone white and stuck in stringy clumps to the rotting, flaying flaps of skin still on her scalp. Her teeth were yellowed and bloody, her face sunken, rotting.

But her eyes. Worst of all were her eyes, no longer so black – because they were tinged with small, moving masses. Maggots, crawling over, under, into her sockets, even as the bulbous horror of her distended eyeballs fixed me with gleeful, delighted malice.

I tried not to panic. I swear, I did. But breathing was hard enough without the horrific, sickly-sweet stench of Izanami’s decaying body. She squeezed my hand harder, her long, curling nails pressing into my palm so hard that I screamed.

Her teeth chattered as she laughed, as blood streamed down my fingers, drawn by her dead, wicked talons. The dress she wore was gone, and her chest heaved and bucked as she chortled, her rotted lungs working like bellows as her grating laughter filled my ears.

And the dead screamed on, and on, and on.

Chapter 14

I blinked, and the world wasn’t green anymore.

The room was dark, the music pounding, the lights flickering and switching between all shades of florescence. I was back in the Leather Glovebox. Sterling and the others were still watching me surreptitiously, their eyes flitting in my direction each time they took sips of their drinks.

“They don’t know,” Izanami’s voice said in my ear.

I shuddered at the touch of her breath, but the fetid stench of her ruined lungs was gone. The air that left her perfect lips smelled faintly of sweet sake, of flowers. Shuddering, my sweat gone cold in the club’s air-conditioning, I turned to her slowly.

The goddess was whole again, perfect, her true form put away as easily as a change of clothes. She released my hand, finally, and I looked down at my palm. The skin was unbroken and clear as it was before, except for the three telltale black dots that showed where her nails had drawn my blood.

“So that was it?” I said, desperate for the tremble to leave my voice. “You took my blood, and that was my offering?”

Suspicious, I thought. That couldn’t have been the only price.

Izanami smiled sweetly, gesturing to Jonnifer, no doubt ordering another bottle of sake.

“It was your terror that I wanted, sweet Dustin. You shamed my children in battle, and I longed to humiliate you in turn. Now, we are even.”

“I don’t know about even,” I said, patting at the front of my jeans. “I’m pretty sure I pissed myself.”

Izanami laughed. “Even better. See, I couldn’t have taken your life, or your soul, for where would that leave me? You’d be dead, and the Old Ones would still come to destroy everything. So fear it was, one of the primal forces that fuel the blasphemous miracles of necromancy.”

It made more sense now. I’d once seen Asher relishing in the pain of others, feeding off of it himself, that time when we’d

attacked the cult of the Viridian Dawn together. I had to wonder, though: I’d never seen him actually expend that power. I wondered where it all went.

“Okay,” I said. “You’ve probably had your fun, and I’m probably in need of a change of boxers. Could we have that ritual now? Pretty please?”

Izanami ushered me back to the bar, where she gladly accepted a new round of sake, pouring one little cup out for me. I watched her fingers – I didn’t want another situation like that time Dionysus poisoned me – and when it looked clear that she had no intention of dosing me, I took the cup eagerly. I needed something to wash that horror out of my body. I savored the coolness of the sake, its sweetness and its fire as it burned its way down my throat. Ah. Some spirits, to settle my own spirits.

“Good,” Izanami said. “You trust me enough to drink with me.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Just, no more sudden, hair-raising transformations next time? Or maybe give me a warning before you go full death goddess again.”

She laughed, full and throaty. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

Getting the ritual was sort of anti-climactic. She asked Jonnifer for a pen, then scrawled the shopping list onto the back of a napkin. I say shopping list because the ritual wasn’t simply a ritual, but a sort of recipe, a guide for the creation of an artifact.

I guess I was about to enchant my very first magical item. Hey, not bad.

We headed back to the Boneyard shortly after, Sterling protesting, but ultimately agreeing that there were somewhat more important things we had to attend to that didn’t involve a sex sling and a ball-gag. In the rideshare back, I remembered something I’d meant to ask Gil about Prudence.

“Gil? When I was out with Carver and Asher, that incident near Latham’s Cross? Bastion showed up with Royce, but no sign of Prudence. Is something going on there? They’re supposed to be partners.”

Gil scratched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, yeah. Figures, one of us should have told you sooner. She’s on hiatus from work for a minute.”

I cocked one eyebrow. “I didn’t know about this.”