A Family Affair
Chapter Six
Bump, bump, bump.
It sounded like someone was hammering on a door, John thought vaguely. He wished they’d stop. Or that someone would answer the damn thing. He couldn’t sleep with all this pounding going on.
Bump, bump, bump.
Or with all this pain. Every thud made agonized lightning zigzag behind his eyeballs, to the point that he was getting nauseous with it. It reminded him of a few of the hangovers he’d had in the bad old days, when he’d found solace, or what passed for it, in the bottom of a bottle.
Bump.
Except this hurt more.
Bump, bump, b-
Bugger it! If someone didn’t get that damn thing—
John opened his eyes, just in time to close them again in a tortured wince as—ump—the back of his cranium came down, connecting with what felt like solid rock. A disoriented moment later, he realized that it was rock, specifically an uneven floor that he was being dragged across by the legs, his head allowed to bounce along behind the rest of him as best it could.
Which probably explained why it felt like a particularly ill-used football.
He tried to take stock, but it was a little difficult. He couldn’t see bugger all, being in almost complete darkness; his arms were bound to his sides and his coat was gone, which explained the raw meat texture of his back. But his weapons…one of them was somewhere nearby.
He could feel it, the enchantment it carried chiming along his nerves like a glissando of bells. Cool and sweet, it was soothingly familiar. And loud, so loud that he had to be almost—
It was the small knife next to his right calf. John blinked, taking a moment to absorb the fact that some idiot had actually left his boots on. And had compounded the folly by not even checking them for weapons first. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted, but on the whole he thought he’d go with—
BUMP.
--seriously fucking up whoever was responsible.
He dragged the tattered threads of his concentration together, focusing them on that tiny chime. He could usually do this without thinking, an almost automated response after so long, like breathing. It was more difficult now, but he finally felt the connection snap into place and all that dormant magic spring to life, eager to leap to his defense at a whispered—
“No!” someone yelled, slinging him against a wall. Which hurt like the devil, since he had no way to avoid hitting face first. But on the whole that bothered him less than the supernova that suddenly erupted all around him.
John instinctively turned his head further into the wall, but that only seemed to make things worse. Light seared his eyeballs even through the lids, spearing straight through to his brain. For a brief instant he could see every blood vessel on the inside of his head, feel every scraped-raw nerve lit up in excruciating clarity.
And then something hot and intense shot though his body like a bolt of lightning before grounding itself in his spine.
Someone let out a not-so-manly mewl of pain and he hoped it wasn’t him. He didn’t think so, actually. Because he was fairly certain that his tongue had just fused to the roof of his mouth.
Someone else didn’t have that problem. He recognized Sid’s voice, cursing up a storm in some long-dead language, but he couldn’t see him. Not even when the light finally dimmed, the wildly jumping aftereffects insuring that he remained blind as a bat. Hoping that that was true for his attacker as well, John pried his tongue loose and started an incantation, only to stop when a knife was pressed hard against his jugular.
“Not if you want to live,” Sid rasped, and the words died in his throat.
But not because of the threat. The blade currently denting his skin was well-oiled and razor sharp—and bleating at him alarmingly because it was his weapon. Sid must have caught it mid-flight, which would have been impressive except that a syllable from John would send it plunging into the demon’s gut before he knew what had hit him. But John didn’t utter that syllable. Because he didn’t think the stark panic in Sid’s voice was fake.
And a moment later he knew it wasn’t when his eyes finally adjusted.
“Do you see?” Sid demanded.
John saw. It was rather hard to miss, since every surface of the low-ceilinged tunnel they were in had turned as translucent as alabaster, lit from within by hundreds of glowing red lines. They spidered through the rock like veins in marble--or under the skin, because these pulsed with some strange, unearthly fire that brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed, as if driven by the beating of a distant heart.
It was like being in the belly of a huge, still-breathing animal, John’s brain helpfully supplied, until he snarled at it to shut up. But the impression was damn apt, heightened by the unhappy rumbling in the stones around him and the heat generated by all that trapped energy. At least that explained why the shreds of his T-shirt were plastered to his body, he thought blankly.
Or maybe that was terror.
“To answer that question you asked earlier,” Sid said, his voice dripping sarcasm, “they mined brimstone here. It’s why I could magic you up here, but not in here.” The little demon pulled the knife away from John’s throat and shook it at him, before tucking it away in his waistband.
John’s eyes followed it, but he made no effort to call it to him. Because the substance known on earth as ‘brimstone’ resembled the demon variety only in the overwhelming smell of rotten eggs. It didn’t rain fire from the heavens, as some human legends insisted, or destroy entire cities. He’d always suspected that those accounts were ancient memories of the last of the demon wars, a few battles of which had been fought on earth. Then the sky had burned, along with huge swathes of land, obliterated by single blasts.
Of the stuff glowing a few inches away from his face.
“It’s laced all though these rocks,” Sid informed him, slapping the side of the corridor hard enough to make John wince, even though he knew that wouldn’t set it off. Sid could stick a pick axe through the wall and it would make no difference. Brimstone responded to only one thing.
Unfortunately, it happened to be the thing that John needed rather badly right now.