Chapter 20. Annette #3
He was the size of a ten-year-old child, with thin limbs and a thick gut. A bushy beard the color of dirty straw emphasized his jutting chin and oversized teeth. He wore cutoff jeans and bright blue Crocs.
“Don’t worry. Hob’s not dead.” Alex jumped down behind me. “The blades are stainless steel. They don’t do any permanent damage to his kind. I just needed to shut him up.”
I approached the hearth devil. There wasn’t much blood. I kept my attention on Alex in case he tried to stop me, but he just smiled as I pulled the two knives from the devil’s chest.
Hob’s eyes snapped open, and he gasped. “Fuck me with a cactus named Betty. That hurt!” He looked up at me. “Well, hello there, sugar-tits.”
I tossed the steak knives aside and drew my Bowie. “This one isn’t stainless steel.”
He tried to scoot away, but the ropes held him in place. Alex had done a nice job with the knots.
“All right, all right,” said Hob. “Don’t get your pruney ass in a bind.”
“Hob has been engraving the sealing spells on my pills for me,” said Alex.
“Temple thought it might have been done with lasers,” I said.
“Lasers?” snapped Hob. “Every one of those spells was handwritten by yours truly, using a pen a tenth the width of one of your kinky gray pubes.”
I grabbed him by the beard and pulled. “That was rude.”
“Now you see why I stabbed him?” Alex chuckled and stepped closer. “I considered killing him once I had enough pills, but his knowledge and his skills might still be useful.”
Hob spat. “You cosmic dumbass. R’gngyk is going to devour this world and shit it out in comet-sized chunks.”
Alex ignored him. He stabbed his cutlass into the floor and picked up a blotchy blue-green metal triangle, identical to the ones I’d seen in the galley.
“Hob also helped with the spellcraft on these. They’re my little portholes to R’gngyk.
They’re made of metal from a meteorite that’s older than this planet, and you have no idea what I had to go through to get my hands on it. ”
He tossed it to me. I caught it and immediately wished I hadn’t. It was ice cold, and the texture was like desiccated bone.
“I need you to cut yourself,” he said. “Let your blood fall directly through the center of the triangle.”
“How much blood?”
“No more than ten pints, I think. I need to rouse R’gngyk enough to tap into his power but not enough to destroy the world. I thought building a small band of worshippers would do it, but their little blood prayers barely interrupted R’gngyk’s snores. Metaphorically speaking.”
“You’re willing to risk the world—a world you’re a part of, mind you—for more power?
” I didn’t know why I bothered to ask. I’d built a career out of stopping people who’d risked the world for their own power.
None of them ever considered the possibility that they could fail.
None of them gave a damn about who they hurt or killed in the process.
True to form, Alex just scoffed. “I’ve studied and prepared for decades to become a Hunter of R’gngyk. I promise you, the world will be just fine.”
Hob made a disgusted—and disgusting—snort. “At least once R’gngyk consumes us all, I won’t have to listen to this whiny speck of ass dandruff go on about how unfair his life has been.”
I placed the blade of my Bowie near my wrist. “What about Morgan and the others? Can you undo what’s happened to them?”
“They’ve been touched by R’gngyk, and they will serve him for as long as they hear his call. I couldn’t change that if I wanted to.”
I threw the knife. Eight and a half inches of enchanted steel buried itself in Alex’s chest.
“About fucking time,” crowed Hob.
I tossed the triangle to the floor.
Alex stared at the hilt protruding from his sternum. When he looked up at me, fury twisted his features.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
He yanked the knife from his chest and charged me. I blocked his arm at the wrist. It was like blocking a Buick. The impact jolted me to my heels. I wrapped my fingers around his forearm and extended my claws through skin and into the muscle.
Alex tried to yank free. The knife fell. I reached for his throat.
He clubbed me from the other side.
My vision flashed. I found myself on the floor, reviewing basic math. Alex had one arm. I’d been holding that arm. One minus one was zero, so what the hell had he hit me with?
I blinked until I could focus again. Alex held his hand over the oozing wound in his chest. From the stump of his left arm, a thick black tentacle drew back for another blow.
I rolled to the side. The tentacle slammed the floor so hard, the floorboards snapped and splintered. I slashed the tentacle with my claws as it drew back.
Alex howled in pain.
Interesting. It hadn’t appeared to hurt much when I stabbed his human flesh. I got to my feet and beckoned with one claw, daring him to try again.
Instead, he turned tail and fled through a door marked brIG.
I snatched up my knife and went after him.
The brig was a cramped room with two pirate mannequins trapped behind bars and what looked like a recently added doorway off the ship.
I ducked through the raggedly cut hole in the wall to find Alex pulling himself up onto the gangplank by his tentacle, which had thinned and stretched to more than ten feet in length.
The gangplank was too high for me to reach. Without a tentacle of my own—or, better yet, a rope—I’d have to go back up through the ship. By which time he’d be gone.
“Fuck!” I kicked the hull of the Widowmaker hard enough to splinter one of the boards, then stormed back inside. I went straight to the cargo hold, marched up to the hearth devil, and sliced the ropes securing him in place. “Hob, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.” He looked me up and down. “You should know I’m immune to your little sex tricks, so don’t try anything, lady.”
“That man attacked my home and my friends. He did something to my grandson that I don’t know if I’ll be able to undo. And he got away. So, let me be very clear, little devil. I’m in no mood to fuck anyone or anything. But I’d very much like to kill something.”
Hob swallowed hard and remained silent.
“Start looking through Alex’s things,” I said. “Gather every scrap of paper, every spell and note and diagram, everything that will help us understand exactly what we’re dealing with.”
He eyed my knife. “Yeah, sure. Whatever. What are you gonna do?”
My back was already seizing up from being slammed around. I fished through my purse for a bottle of ibuprofen, dry-swallowed two, then grabbed my phone. As painful as that fight had been, this was going to hurt worse. “I have to call Jenny and tell her I lost Alex.”
“Dammit, do you have any clue how long it took me to prepare that place? To convince the owners to give me the keys and go away? To build the necessary protections in the galley? To run the ethernet cable for the gaming setup?”