The Devil's Daughter Complete Box Set, page 100
part #1 of The Devil's Daughter Series
She tried to control her breath to avoid filling the cavernous space with fire. “I’m not stupid. I know you’re fighting her doppelgänger for control over hell. Let me help you.” She spread her wings, nearly touching the side support beams. “Her dragons are no match for me.”
The Cormorant folded her arms behind her wings. “And in exchange, I suppose you want me to abandon my quest for my original body?”
Sere never could figure out why Jenna was so fixated on being a human-shaped doppelgänger. “If all I cared about was staying out of your talons, I’d have remained in life.”
The birdwoman turned her blazing black eyes on Sere. “I’m not stupid either. You wouldn’t be in that dragon if you still had control of your body. Maybe I should side with Marjory Laroque. I’ll bet she’d be more than happy to give me that scrawny-ass female form in exchange for freeing her from your meddling.”
Sere wondered if that had been Marjory’s long game. “I’m sure she would, but then you’d be under her command. Think about it, Jenna. As a birdwoman, you’re a deity in hell. As a normal doppelgänger, you’d have no claim.”
Not a feather moved on the Cormorant. “Never use that name again.”
Sanguine moved between the two and spread her wings as if signaling the end of round one. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Sere isn’t turning loose of her body, but her help isn’t contingent on you giving up your quest. For now, put your differences aside so we can focus on our shared enemy. Where are you at with establishing peace between the harvesters and doppelgängers?”
The Cormorant shrugged her wings and pointed her beak at Sere. “About as well as you’re doing with me and my body snatcher over there.”
Sanguine put her hands on her hips while keeping her wings spread wide. It was a stance Sere remembered well. “Are you finished?”
The Cormorant lowered her wings. “The harvesters obey my commands, but many of the doppelgängers still believe they can have safety by taking one of Madam Laroque’s coins.”
Sere had gotten enough of a rundown from Doodlebug to realize how misguided the attempted union had been between the powerful women. “Isn’t it your face on the other side of the doubloon?”
Sanguine looked over her shoulder and glared at Sere. “This squabbling isn’t helping.”
Sere lowered her head. “I was just pointing out that as the Cormorant, she does bear some responsibility for so many doppelgängers missing limbs.”
Sanguine lowered her wings so far that the tips touched the wet concrete floor. “This is pointless. You two are never going to agree to anything.”
“We both hate Marjory Laroque.” The Cormorant aimed the comment up at Sere. “That’s something at least. I’m not working with you. That would involve a level of trust we’ll never achieve, but I also won’t stand against you. Though Madam Laroque might be able to work with her real to get me my body, she has an annoying way of dangling the carrot without ever delivering the prize. I’d rather take my chances on my own. Just don’t cross me or go after my harvesters the way your minion did.”
“So you’d leave me to do your dirty work?” Sere asked.
“Girls!” Sanguine’s wings shook, quivering every single feather.
Sere’s snicker was quickly followed by the Cormorant’s chirping. One of them was a dragon and the other a seven-foot-tall birdwoman—girl didn’t really fit either of them.
Sanguine said, “I swear to my grandmother, if one of you makes one more snarky comment, I’m out of here.”
Sere knew she’d pushed her angel farther than she should have. She lowered her head to the Cormorant’s level. “Can you tell me what I’ll be up against? With you commanding the harvesters and the doppelgänger loyalty in disarray, who is Marjory using for her army?”
She could practically see the irritating response forming on the Cormorant’s face. With a glance at the irate angel, however, the Cormorant’s expression softened. “You already know about her idiot dragons. No offense.”
“None taken. Chloe used a different brand of magic—as well as source material—in creating this form.”
The Cormorant nodded. “Well, since her dragons were something of a disappointment, she moved on to other goblins. There’s a pack of wild half-sentient dogmen that patrol the cemetery walls.”
Shit. Sere hoped Bart was taking his time finding doppelgänger allies and not doing something foolish like trying to beat her to the cemetery. “I think our business is finished here. If we never see each other again, that would be just fine by me.” She turned and took flight before Sanguine could throw another glare of pseudo-parental disdain at her.
Much as Sere enjoyed riding motorcycles, she had to admit that flying as a dragon was pretty fucking cool. She just wished she could have a moment to enjoy the ride without it being a mad rush into battle. She sailed low over the French Quarter. If the doppelidiots were easily swayed by the promises of someone adept at lying, perhaps their loyalty to Madam Laroque did not run very deep. The sight of a dragon who dwarfed Madam Laroque’s little windup toys just might make them switch to Sere’s side. As she flew toward Rampart Street, she could feel the flames boiling in her stomach. Before she let her anger loose, however, she needed to make sure Bart wasn’t in the line of fire.
At the old brick wall that surrounded the cemetery, she spread her wings and made a quick circle of the grounds. Though she didn’t see the motorcycle, that didn’t mean he hadn’t stashed it somewhere out of sight. She glided as low as she dared to peek into every open door and hidden alley. Convinced that he wasn’t within firing range, she got ready to flap her wings to a commanding position.
The ravenous pack of doppeldogs launched out of the tenement windows and onto Sere’s back. Individually, they wouldn’t have been able to drag her down, but as paws pounded against her wings and ravenous teeth tried to penetrate her scales, she lost her command of the air. Before she could land into the sharp claws and razor fangs, she grabbed the cemetery wall and propelled her body away from the buildings filled with Marjory’s goblin hounds. She tumbled against the tombs, knocking the demon dogs from her back and delivering a scorching reminder of her dragon ability to their tails. From out of the crypts, dark figures in black hoods emerged all around her. She took in a deep breath to deliver another fiery response to the harvesters.
“We’re on your side,” the leader yelled. “Bart sent us. We’re part of Doodlebug’s army.” The doppelgänger shed the stolen black cape.
“Get these mongrels off my back!” Sere yelled.
The doppelgängers lunged off the tops of the tombs like ninjas, tumbled along the streets of the dead, and swung swords at the hairy beasts. Other than swatting the bad dogs with her talons, there wasn’t much Sere could do to help.
From above, Marjory’s second wave descended. The small dragons dove and banked among the marble structures with the skills of swallows. With Bart’s warriors so close, Sere didn’t dare bust loose and fill the cemetery with flames. The little bastards, on the other hand, had figured out how to use their hand-torch-sized fires with pinpoint accuracy. Trapped between the goblin hounds and the dragons, the doppelgänger army was forced to retreat toward the back of the cemetery.
“Oh, hell, no.” Sere sent an arching blast of fire overhead then took to the sky. She wasn’t about to let Bart’s hard work of rounding up recruits get pissed away by a mangy pack of dogs and amped-up fireflies. She made a quick dragon-swatting bank turn that tossed the little flamers toward the front gate.
“Keep watch overhead, Sere. Help has arrived.”
She swung her head around. Bart stood in front of a contingent easily twice the size of the advanced force that had come to her aid. They seemed to have manifested right out of the tombs. If she was going to maintain the advantage, she couldn’t take time to question the source of the reinforcements. With two hard flaps of her wings, she sailed over the enemy force while sending a blistering fire down on them. As she passed, Bart’s second wave moved in. The demonic dogs scrambled for the front gate. Faced with failure, the once-organized pack deteriorated into every mutt for himself. The small dragons attempted an escape by flying over the advancing mercenaries. Sere waited until they were a good twenty feet above the ground before filling the sky with her fiery rage.
With Marjory’s creatures skulking away—their scaly and fluffy tails between their legs—Sere landed on top of a mausoleum. She peered into the open tombs. “How many friggin’ doppelgängers did you cram into those crypts? You guys were like clowns coming out of a tiny car.”
Bart wiped the blood from his blades on the pelt of a downed hound. “It occurred to me that though the living Marjory Laroque has unlimited funds for purchasing property, the hell version of the woman has to live by the laws of this dimension.”
Sere shook her head. Bart could get a little full of himself after a victory. “What are you talking about?”
He waved his swords around the cemetery. “Doppelgängers are based on the professor’s equipment, but the structure of hell comes from Agnes Delarosa. The basic elements of the properties don’t change.”
Sere was beginning to follow his reasoning. “So the tunnel under the French Quarter couldn’t be sealed off from the other buildings.”
“Exactly. Back in life, we busted into the bank’s basement by using the tunnel. That’s what alerted our Marjory to the weakness in her defenses. Since neither of us has a duplicate in hell, and Madam Laroque is nearly as independent as her real, there was no reason why she would have known about the tunnel. And even if she had, all she could do was position guards. Since she seemed to be going through soldiers at an alarming rate, I assumed she didn’t have any spare ones to sit around a dark hole, waiting for intruders. I used the same basement we crawled through in life to access the tunnel. From there, it was just a matter of racing down it to the first rotting casket we came to. The ancestor pits under the Laroque mausoleums run deep.”
Bart’s smarts never failed to impress her. “Since we’d agreed to meet at the cemetery, you figured there might be an ambush. That’s why you sent the advanced force.”
“We knew Marjory was using the druggies around the cemetery for her experiments. I wasn’t sure she’d have a force waiting for us, but since some of the dragons escaped us out in the swamp, it was a good bet she knew something was up.” A good two dozen doppelwarriors stood at attention behind Bart.
“Forgive me for ever doubting your abilities.”
He sheathed his swords. “This isn’t the first strange place I’ve landed in without support. Being dropped off in an enemy’s home turf with nothing but my wits and rounding up a paramilitary force with little resources was my specialty.”
“You sound like Joe.”
He ignored the compliment. “How did it go with the Cormorant?”
“Horrible. She says she’ll stay out of our way while we deal with her enemy, but that’s all I got out of her.”
“That’s big of her. Where do you want to start?”
Sere struggled to keep the pieces of the puzzle in front of her. “I need Marjory out of my body—or as Jenna would say, her body—but that’s kind of the final step before we return to the living. Those demons and dragons she hauled into life are the ones that worry me. But even if we can’t end her new devil, if we cut her pets’ cords that pass through hell, the creatures should dissipate.”
Bart paced in front of his band of doppelmercenaries. “Each of them has both the real and double in life, so what’s left in hell to cut?”
“Dammit, how could I be so stupid?” Sere dug her talons into the marble roof, crumbling the stone to dust.
He stopped pacing. “What are you thinking?”
“She doesn’t have a computer, but she does have access to the voodoo totems that were left in the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center.”
Bart rubbed his chin. “There were only eight of them.”
“That’s still a lot of dragons in life. I have to talk to Sanguine. She must have found a spare to transport my soul out to the swamp. Where there’s one, there may be more. I’ve been so focused on the professor’s equipment and the Wiccan realm that I completely ignored the voodoo component of hell. I guess I assumed with Baron Samedi on our side, maybe I’d get a pass. That was stupid.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. Kendell and Myles bear more than a little responsibility for that side of hell. Would those totems be able to act as mirrors?”
“I don’t see why not. If a soul can get locked in one the way Sanguine did to transfer me from the computer to the swamp, it shouldn’t be that hard to cast a spell into the spirit jar. Dammit, I’ve even seen Chloe do something similar with her fucking mirror jars.”
“Okay. At least now we know what we’re looking for. Do you think Madam Laroque would hide them in the bank basement?”
Sere flapped her wings to remove the self-recrimination. “No. According to Doodlebug, Marjory has the real models for her monsters locked in her mansion in life. It would make sense to have the mirrors stashed in the same basement in hell.”
He looked up and down her reptilian body without saying a word.
She spread her wings. “Not very stealthy, am I?” Fitting into a basement, even if it wasn’t underground, would be impossible.
“I’m always looking for the advantages. I’ve got a pretty decent mercenary force. Since it seems unlikely that there will be another grand ball in the mansion like the one Doodlebug attended, our incursion will need a distraction.”
“That’s a relief. For a second, I thought you were going to suggest I transform into Bernie’s body.”
“Our situation is dicey enough without you experimenting with Chloe’s cocktails. Once we’re inside and have the totems, what do we do with them?”
Sere’s first instinct was to chop the wooden heads into kindling, but messing with voodoo without knowing what she was doing had a bad way of biting her in the ass. “I’ll need to check with Kendell. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of smashing the blue-glass jars, but I wouldn’t want you turning curses and spells loose while you and your mercenaries were trapped in the room.”
“So we need Sanguine. Any idea where she ended up after your meeting?”
Sere wasn’t in a hurry to confront her angel again. The woman was pretty pissed after the failed negotiations. “She’s probably working on calming the Cormorant.” She hated to admit it, but a distraction would be a whole lot easier if they had the big bird’s help.
“So long as you’re making contact with the other side, if Fisher can work his magic, I could use the blueprints to the Laroque mansion. While you’re having your chat, I’ll take my army and scout things out.”
She was grateful for the change of topic. “He probably already has them in his desk. At some point, he stopped waiting for me to ask for information and started compiling as much data on our adversaries as he could find.”
“Does every superhero have a sidekick with a magical desk drawer where all of the answers reside?”
“Well, this one does.” Laughing made fire spurt out of her snout. “It would probably be best if we didn’t rendezvous here again.”
“That hidden cache of Joe’s in the Ninth Ward seems pretty secluded.”
The memory of their first time having sex made her wish she didn’t have to deal with the dragon body. “I remember it well.” The purring that emanated from deep in her chest sent a tendril of smoke up from her nostrils.
“Yeah, you were smoking hot that day too.”
She sighed out a wavering candle-sized flame. “I only wish it were in the same way. I’ll carry the memory of that first night together until the day I die. Which may mean your sexual prowess will be immortalized forever.”
“I’ll take a rain check on trying to equal the performance. When we get back to our lives, we may need a week in bed.”
She feared that if the conversation continued, she’d be setting the cemetery alight with more than a dim glow. Being in the dragon body, with an army of mercenary doppelgängers standing at attention, probably wasn’t the most romantic of settings. “I’ll meet you at the shack as soon as I’m done with Kendell.”
Though Sere didn’t believe in goodbyes, she desperately wanted to kiss him. Probably just as well that I can’t.
94
Chapter 9
Sere glided over the river, keeping an eye out for the white angel riding the wind. Though Sanguine would have her hands full dealing with Jenna, Sere doubted the pair had remained together for long after her departure. The angel was slow to anger, but once aroused, she often needed time and space to cool down. Though Sanguine never admitted to it, Sere suspected she used the flights to peek on future events. If that were the case, the woman would know Sere was searching for her.
Out over the swamp, Sere glimpsed a flash of white wings. She banked away from the city, grateful to not have to face the Cormorant or her squadron of squawking gulls. The dragon body easily curved through the wind like it was being called home.
Sanguine landed on a grassy field. The large water-filled dragon prints suggested that the area was well known to Smoke. Sere glided to a raised hump of ground and set her feet on relatively dry land.
Chloe emerged from the trees, flanked by Doodlebug and Jennifer. “How can we help?” the swamp witch asked Sanguine.
The white angel turned to Sere. “Ask her. I’m just the guide this time.”
Sere wanted to probe Sanguine on what she saw in the future, but the angel would just give her the standard line that telling someone about what was to come invariably changed what was meant to be. She guessed that was also how the swamp witch found an additional voodoo totem just lying around unused. Chloe’s dimensional projection of the trio in life made them look like ghosts in the storm. “Bart needs Fisher to dig up the drawings for the Laroque mansion. I’m pretty sure there are voodoo totems in this dimension’s basement that mirror Marjory’s druggies through hell to their dragon doubles. I need Kendell to figure out how to destroy the wooden heads to break the connection.”
