Crashing Paradise Read online

  She set the cans of soda down on the coffee table and picked up the DVD case. “Casablanca. Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It’s one of my favorites.”

  Danny glanced over at Graves and saw an uncharacteristic smile on the ghost’s face.

  “Figures.”

  His mother was really starting to get on his nerves. She’d come to live with him in Mr. Doyle’s Beacon Hill brownstone after their old house in Newton had been destroyed during the confrontation between Conan Doyle’s Menagerie and Danny’s own demon daddy.

  Julia Ferrick had actually found a condo in Brighton, and would be moving in a couple of days. The day couldn’t come fast enough as far as Danny was concerned. He loved his mom, but having her around twenty-four/seven was getting old.

  “So, are you game?” she asked him, wiggling the plastic case in front of his face.

  “I don’t care,” he said with a shrug. “Don’t know why you’d want to though, both of you have already seen it.”

  “But you haven’t,” his mother said cheerily, getting up from her seat to put the DVD into the player. “Excuse me, Leonard,” she said to the hovering phantasm, and the two shared a certain look before Graves drifted out of the way.

  That little glance they shared made Danny want to puke.

  It wasn’t bad enough that he’d found out that his real father was an evil son of a bitch. Evil with a capital E. Not bad enough that his physical changes were getting worse just about every day, making him less and less human and more and more demon. Now he had to worry about his mother crushin’ on a ghost. Life didn’t get much weirder than this.

  At least Graves is a pretty cool guy, he reflected, and it could be a lot worse—she could have the hots for Squire.

  Danny stifled a smile that threatened to crack his typically sour demeanor as his mother returned to her seat.

  The movie started with a series of ads that he quickly advanced through to get to the actual DVD menu.

  “Ready?” he asked, with as little enthusiasm as possible, pointing the remote at the television. As he laid his head on the overstuffed arm of the sofa, he saw his mother motioning to Graves to sit beside her on the couch.

  “I’m fine here,” the ghost said, glancing at the television screen. “Really.”

  “It’s distracting,” his mother said.

  Dr. Graves looked at her, his nearly transparent features etched with confusion.

  “The floating,” Julia said. “It’s very distracting.”

  The ghost hesitated momentarily, but soon succumbed to his mother’s wishes, drifting over to sit on the other side of her. He could not actually sit, of course, but managed to create the illusion of being seated, just as he often appeared to be walking, though his feet never touched the ground.

  “Now, isn’t this comfy?” Julia said, leaning back in her seat.

  “Give me a fucking break,” Danny mumbled, hitting the PLAY button on the remote to start the movie.

  His mother sighed at his language but didn’t correct him this time. Then the movie began to play. He just about shit when he saw that it was in black and white. Danny hated movies that weren’t in color and made his displeasure known with heavy groans as he dropped his head back against the sofa.

  “Give it a chance,” his mother said, and patted his leg affectionately.

  He considered swatting her hand away but thought better of it, catching himself before the damage could be done. She already had issues with some of his recent behavior; no reason to add to the list.

  Danny slouched down in his seat, arms folded defiantly across his chest and watched the movie he was certain was going to suck moose dick.

  Half an hour into it—much as he hated to—Danny had to admit he’d been wrong. Casablanca didn’t suck moose dick.

  In fact it didn’t suck any kind of dick at all. It was really good . . . especially for an old, black-and-white movie that starred people who had been dead since way before he was born.

  But he wasn’t about to let his mother and Graves know that.

  “Well, what did you think?” Julia asked, when the film had finished. She rummaged through the bag of popcorn for the last of the crumbs. “Wasn’t it wonderful?”

  Danny shrugged. “It was all right. I don’t know if I’d call it a classic though.” He picked up his soda can, tipping it toward his mouth just in case there was anything left. There wasn’t.

  He felt Graves’s eyes on him, a creepy feeling that could only be compared to the first uncomfortable sensation you feel when breaking out in a nasty skin rash. And from all the physical changes he’d undergone the last couple of years, he knew a thing or two about skin rashes.

  “And how exactly would you define a classic?” Graves asked. “I’m curious.”

  Danny shrugged, thinking about the question. “I don’t know. Maybe something that isn’t so freakin’ old?”

  Graves nodded, seemingly understanding where he was coming from.

  “I see,” said the ghost. “So a motion picture . . . perhaps in color . . . would have a better chance of reaching the status of classic?”

  “Exactly,” Danny said. “And it would also have to have a lot more action.” He nodded, thinking about his criteria.

  “Yeah . . . color, action, and sex. It’s gotta have a hot sex scene.”

  Julia threw up her hands. “That’s it,” she said. “Think we’ve talked enough about the classics.”

  Danny liked to see his mother squirm, especially in the presence of her new boyfriend . . . or whatever the hell he was. Normally she would have just rolled her eyes and ignored him, but since Graves was there, it made her suddenly uncomfortable, like he’d think she was a bad parent or something.

  He was about to ask her why she was blushing when Conan Doyle’s doorbell began to chime.

  “Who could that be at this hour?” Julia asked, glancing at her watch.

  “I’ll see,” Danny said, springing off the couch and jogging toward the doorway. “It’ll give you two a chance to be alone.”

  He started to laugh again, knowing that if he’d looked at his mother, her eyes would have been shooting daggers at him. She and Graves had been flirting around with each other for weeks now, but if confronted with the suggestion of her interest in the ghost, his mother immediately dismissed it as nonsense.

  Danny saw the way they looked at each other, listened to how they spoke. Everybody in the house knew that something was definitely on the verge of going on, even though his mother and Dr. Graves seemed either oblivious or determined to hide what they felt. It was about time that they knew that the little dance they were doing wasn’t fooling anyone.

  The demon boy stopped at the front door, leaning in toward the peephole for a look. He was surprised to see Clay—a friend, and a member of Conan Doyle’s Menagerie—standing on the front step. The shapeshifter wore his favorite face today, the one he most often used to walk among ordinary people.

  “What the hell?” Danny said, unlocking the door and pulling it open.

  “Can I come in?” Clay asked, attempting to look past him and into the house.

  “Duh, you live here,” Danny said, turning his back on the shapeshifting creature that he had learned to call friend.

  “Why didn’t you just use your key?”

  There was a rustling behind him, the sound that he had come to associate with his friend’s shapeshifting.

  I can become anything ever created by—or even thought of by God, Clay had once told him.

  As Danny turned to face his friend, he saw the last moment of Clay’s transformation into a thing that looked as though it had been shat out by the world’s worst nightmare.

  He grinned, about to ask Clay what kind of god would even think of something as nasty as that.

  He never got the chance.

  Clay lunged at him, claws ripping the air, and Danny had no more questions—only the instinct to stay alive.

  CERIDWEN remembered.

  Horrid images of the past co
llided with the immediacy of the present.

  Like a grizzled warrior gazing at the raised, silvery scarring from what had once been a near-fatal wound, she recalled her first encounter with Duergar.

  It had nearly been the death of her.

  THE blizzard in the Northern hills was relentless; blinding.

  Icy snow rode the shrieking gusts like tiny blades of shattered glass. Even through the white sheets driven by howling wind, she could see that they were dead.

  The Twilight Wars had caused thousands of elfin refugees to flee their homes, seeking sanctuary in the mountains and caverns of Tullanah, perhaps the most inhospitable region of Faerie.

  Some of them never made it there. Ceridwen had stumbled upon them—hundreds of women and children, most elfin but some Fey as well—horribly murdered and mutilated. The mangled bodies were stacked in a pile, dark blood seeping out from around the base of the mound, steaming in the snow.

  Already the bodies were being covered by a blanket of white, as if the elements were part of some vile conspiracy to conceal the horror of the loathsome act.

  Ceridwen, Arthur, and their allies were determined to wait out the fierce storm in the refugee camp, perhaps partaking of a warm meal and drink before continuing with the hunt for their elusive quarry. But there would be no respite, no brief moment of peace in which they could temporarily forget the atrocities perpetrated by the one they pursued.

  “Form a circle!” Ceridwen commanded over the wailing winds, tearing her gaze from the sight of the stacked bodies, soon to be covered up by the storm.

  Conan Doyle and the soldiers under her command did as they were instructed, weapons at the ready.

  “He will not have gone far,” she added, squinting through the whipping snow, searching for a sign of the barbarian’s passing.

  She knew the dark heart of this enemy all too well.

  Duergar would have stayed behind to see their reaction to this latest act of cruelty. He would still be here, somewhere.

  The Twilight Wars had changed all who had fought in them, whether on the side of light or darkness. Duergar had been a monster before, and the war had made him into something worse.

  Much worse.

  “Damn the storm,” Conan Doyle growled, shielding his eyes with a leather-gauntleted hand.

  Ceridwen had been about to speak the language of the mountain storm, requesting a brief lull, when over the wail of the winds she heard a different sound.

  A child’s cry.

  They all heard it, but the wind distorted the sound, making it nearly impossible to locate its source.

  Their circle remained tight. Again they heard the pitiful cry. This time it seemed to come from within the ravaged elfin encampment.

  Is it possible? Ceridwen wondered, turning toward the collapsed and broken walls of the shelter. Had someone managed to survive Duergar’s cruelty?

  Then she saw it; movement from the pile of mangled corpses. Accumulating snow dropped from the bloodied bodies, revealing the expressions of terror that had been frozen upon the victims’ faces in death.

  Again the cry—a high, keening wail—and Ceridwen gasped as two tiny hands pushed out from beneath the corpses, followed by the squirming body of an elfin child. Like some macabre birth, the bloody little girl emerged from a womb built from the dead. The child was hysterical, her body wracked with a terrible trembling.

  They all reacted as one, the circle breaking as they each moved to comfort the wailing toddler.

  Ceridwen faltered, squinting through the snow.

  Why is she alive?

  She had seen the half-blood’s other kills, and those sights had caused her many a restless night. Though he had the build and strength of a Drow, he had the cleverness of his Fey ancestry. A cunning monster was Duergar.

  “Stop!” Ceridwen shouted, just as one of her soldiers—

  Fendarith—squatted down in front of the child, pulling her shaking body to him and wrapping her in his scarlet cloak.

  Conan Doyle must have sensed her unease. Blue eldritch energies began to spark at his fingertips.

  “It is all right, Princess Ceridwen,” Fendarith said, turning toward her with the child. “I have one at home just this age and—”

  The sentence would never be completed. The pile of corpses seemed to come alive, bodies erupting in all directions as Duergar surged up from his hiding place beneath the mountain of death.

  Time slowed to a crawl.

  It was Fendarith’s first instinct to protect the child. He turned his back to their enemy, seeking to shield her. Duergar snatched him up from the ground as though he, himself, was a child. Fendarith had dropped the girl, who scrambled away, screaming, as the towering half-blood monster raised the soldier over his head and in one fluid movement dashed his body to the cold, frozen earth, never to move again.

  The Fey soldiers drew their swords as Ceridwen and Conan Doyle summoned deadly magics with which to combat the barbaric creature. The elemental sorceress raised her staff, and the storm began to bend around her, lashing at Duergar, whipping him with stabbing ice. Conan Doyle thrust out his hands, and a burst of vivid yellow light arced from his fingertips and struck the monster in the chest, burning through his armor, searing his leathery flesh.

  Duergar staggered backward two steps. Only two. He dropped to his knees, thrust his fists through the snow and into the ground, and the frozen earth beneath them began to tremble. Then he charged. In that single moment when they were caught off guard, the swift half-blood snatched the child up in one of his enormous hands. Fingers as thick as tree limbs wrapped tightly around the body of the squealing little girl, keeping her close to shield himself from attack.

  “Hold!” Ceridwen cried over the howling storm, stifling the magic that was about to flow from the end of her staff, pulling it back inside of her. For the sake of the child, there was no choice. From the corners of her eyes she could still make out the crackle of magic that danced upon the fingertips of her lover’s hands, and smell the faint aroma of burning flesh as he held back its release.

  The most terrifying aspect of their enemy’s monstrous countenance was not the tribal tattoos on his face and arms, or the yellow tusks that jutted from his lower jaw . . . it was his eyes.

  She had looked into the gaze of many a monster; of murderers too numerous to count. It was like looking into the eyes of an animal caught in the grip of madness. But in Duergar’s yellow eyes was a terrible intelligence. Malignant.

  Evil.

  The elfin child cried out as he brought her closer to his broad face.

  “Such a wonderful girl,” he growled, eyes unblinking as his gaze darted from one enemy to the next. “Did exactly as she was told.” He kissed her then, his large cracked lips pressing to the child’s bloody face. “A good friend, she is, a good friend indeed.”

  “Release the child,” Ceridwen commanded, the sphere of ice and fire atop her staff glowing with a fierce, white light.

  “Are you a good friend, my pretty princess?” the monster asked.

  His eyes glittered happily. She did not want to hear him, see him, anymore, wanted nothing more than to unleash the full fury of her rage.

  But the child . . .

  Duergar gave the elfin girl a sudden, vicious shake and she cried out, reminding them all of how fragile his captive was.

  Ceridwen felt her soldiers’ eyes upon her. She had handpicked this group, and their bravery, loyalty, and fierceness in battle had become nearly legendary. With their skill and Arthur at her side, she knew she could finally put an end to Duergar’s evil. They waited for her reaction, ready to do her bidding at a moment’s notice.

  “What do you want?” she asked, hating the words as they fell from her mouth. Hating herself for uttering them.

  Duergar laughed again. “You surprise me, pretty princess.”

  The half-blood reached up and stroked the girl’s head. “But that is what is so special about this life we live . . . the surprises.”

  H
e grinned, jagged teeth tinted red from the blood of his victims.

  “Set the child free, and go,” Ceridwen said, her voice booming over the moans of the wind.

  “Just like that?” Duergar asked, obviously amused. “I give up this child to you, and you let me go free?”

  Ceridwen nodded, her next words nearly causing her to choke. “You have my word.”

  Duergar gazed at the child in his hand. “Such a quandary I face,” he murmured, stroking her dark hair, flecked with snow and ice. “I give you to them, and I’m allowed to go free, losing myself in these mountains until it is time for me to scratch another itch . . .”

  The monster glanced at the bodies that littered the ground around him. His smile faded, and he raised his eyes to gaze at Ceridwen.

  “And then you come for me again.”

  He tore the little girl’s head from her body, turning the stump of her neck toward them so that they were sprayed with the gore that erupted from her body.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Duergar roared, eyes wild as he popped the little girl’s head into his gaping jaws and began to chew, crunching her skull in his teeth.

  4

  THE distant memories seemed so fresh that Ceridwen could still feel the melting snow upon her face and taste the bitter bile of rage in her mouth. Years had passed, and now she faced Duergar again, and his fists were stained with the blood of innocents once more.

  With a cry of fury, the Fey sorceress raised her staff and summoned the wrath of the elements down upon her foe. The glorious blue desert sky turned nearly black, a sudden storm whipped into a frenzy by her magic and her rapport with the spirits of the air. The rain punished the ground, falling in prickling sheets, and the thunder growled like some great primordial beast.

  “It’s been some time, pretty princess,” the monster said over the hissing of the downpour.

  Hatred flowed through her body and into the wood of her staff. Fire danced with her rage inside the ice sphere atop it.

  With a scream that echoed the one torn from her lungs when she’d watched the half-blood murder that small child, Ceridwen called down the fangs of the storm upon him.