Blood was filling her mouth, and she struggled to swallow it. The hand pincered in, harder and tighter, until she couldn’t breathe.
Her veiled eyes protruded from their sockets, blood trickling from the corners. More blood came seeping from her broken mouth, from her nose and from both ears. It was as though her entire skull was a great sponge, filled with crimson blood, and Baron Tourment was squeezing it slowly dry.
The giant black braced himself on his splinted legs, lifting Mother Midnight until her bare feet hung clear of the carpet, kicking and jerking. He wrinkled his broad nose at the stench as she lost control of both bladder and bowels and fouled herself. But his grip didn’t relax for a moment.
The last sound she heard, deep within her own head, was a soft cracking, like a man setting his heel to a fresh apple.
“Adieu, Mama,” whispered the man, opening finger and thumb with a gesture of revulsion, allowing the corpse to drop to the floor at his feet. He wiped the blood from his hand on his dark cotton shirt.
There was a polite knock on the door of the luxury suite.
“Come.”
“It’s over, Lord?”
“Yes, Mephisto. It’s over. Remove that and dispose of it to the pets.” The grating Creole French was gone and the man spoke perfect English.
“And then? She saw something?”
“I think so. Something could be real bad. Pass the word for extra care.”
“Who can they be?”
The massive black creaked across the room and collapsed inelegantly on a long sofa, stretching the exoskeleton and sighing.
“Not that white butcher kid and his friends?”
“Lauren and his gang?”
“No, Mephisto. The bocor woman here smelled something new. From outside the swamps.”
Mephisto grinned wolfishly. “It is a vengeful spirit come to punish you for your evil, Baron Tourment.”
It was dangerous to make that kind of joke, but the sec boss had judged the moment well.
“You think maybe that? Do I do wrong? No. A man like me shouldn’t worry about something like that. It may even be blasphemous.”
He threw back his leonine head and laughed uproariously at his own joke. Mephisto joined in, stopping when the baron pointed a long, bloodied finger at him.
“But take care. Who knows what manner of creature moves amongst us?”
Chapter Three
“THIS PLACE is fucking something else,” complained Hennings, swatting irritably at a huge mosquito that had battened on his shoulder.
“These bastard fly-bugs are the biggest I ever saw,” added Finnegan.
“Muties,” commented J.B., laconic as ever.
The Armorer used his pocket sextant to take a sighting of the glowering orb of the sun through the dense foliage of the forest surrounding them. It confirmed his original suspicion that they were in the Deep South, around two hundred miles west of the old port of New Orleans.
“Cajun country,” said Doc Tanner, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow with a massive kerchief with a swallow’s-eye design.
“What’s a Cajun?” asked Ryan, easing the shoulder strap of his weapon.
“Around five hundred years ago, back in the 1600s, the French settled on a part of the east coast that would later be known as Nova Scotia. The soil being fertile and the climate temperate, the settlers called their paradise Acadia. More than a hundred years later, the British drove them out of the region and the Acadians fled south to these parts. Acadians got corrupted to Cajuns. Simple, isn’t it?”
Nobody said anything, and Ryan wondered, as he had a hundred times in the past few weeks, just how the old man came to have such a bottomless supply of knowledge.
AFTER LEAVING the small redoubt they had tugged the door shut behind them. At J.B.’s suggestion, they had put a tracer on it so they could find their way back through the labyrinth. But the tiny trans didn’t work.
“Damp,” said J.B. disgustedly. “Don’t have another, Have to watch our path real careful.”
Ryan led the way, following the faint remains of a narrow two-lane blacktop through the trees and shrubs. Never in his life had he seen anything like this place. Not even in his dreams.