King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1) Read online

  Lydia had managed to make it back to her feet as the man in white tilted his hand to the side, letting the remains of the molten gun fall to the ground. He brushed his hands together as if wiping off whatever remained. “I have never liked firearms,” the man commented idly, stepping over the cooling puddle of ex-pistol and toward where Nick and Lydia had retreated.

  “What are you?” Nick asked, finding his voice first, even if it cracked with fear. “What the hell do you want from us?”

  “My name is Lyon,” he said as he took a single stride, causing the both of them to back away in time to his advance. “I wish for you to come with me.” He paused then spoke again, thoughtfully. “Peacefully, I might add.”

  “Where?” Lydia asked, finally able to speak. “Go where?”

  “That subject, while tempting to discuss, is, I fear, too esoteric to explore in our limited time. I may only beg your forgiveness,” Lyon responded with all the passionate delivery of a rock. But he seemed sincere, at least. The man wasn’t mocking them. He took another step forward, and they took another step backward together as he approached.

  When Lyon raised his hand, they both flinched, as if he was going to attack them. Honestly, he might. The guy didn’t seem armed, but he had melted a goddamn gun with his bare hand. Fireballs were next, for all she knew.

  There was a noise from behind them, a sort of a whooshing sound, and then a low hum that resembled the sound from a power generator.

  Nick and Lydia turned, and for the second time, Lydia wished she hadn’t.

  There, painted onto the world, was…a black circle. It was about eight or ten feet in diameter and seemed to hover impossibly a few inches off the ground, suspended in space. It was a blot dropped onto the surface of reality. It had no depth, no movement—just darkness. It looked like a cartoon from Roger Rabbit, superimposed upon existence and having no business just floating there in space. No light reflected off it, and the streetlamps nearby cast nothing into the darkness. It was just a big black dot.

  Add it to the list.

  “Please, step through the gate, if you will,” Lyon said from behind them. He was, as ridiculous as it sounded, earnestly asking them to go through it.

  Oh, hell no.

  “You’re kidding me,” Lydia said and looked back at him. “You’re seriously joking.”

  “Do not force me to ask again,” Lyon said with a small sigh. “While I hesitate to resort to violence, my kin feel no such compulsion, I warn you. Sympathy amongst my kind is a rarity.”

  Lydia looked back to the inky, unmoving, and uncanny blot in space. Then, as it hadn’t moved and didn’t seem to be a threat, she looked back at the tall man. The monster in the suit of armor had carried a sword. This man carried nothing at all, but she felt no safer.

  “What happens on the other side?” Lydia asked.

  He smiled faintly with the barest twinge to thin lips. “No harm will come to you. You will continue to live. The matter is complex. Please, we may discuss this at length and leisure after you step through the gate.”

  She realized, looking at Lyon closer now, that he had several white markings on his face. Just like the body on the slab. It looked like a white ink tattoo, and it ran from his temple in a straight line down his cheek and to his jaw and down his neck. It was hard to see, as his skin was so pale.

  “His marks are just like the ones the corpse had,” Lydia muttered to Nick under her breath.

  “Go left?” Nick replied under his breath. It meant he was going to go right. Divide and conquer—it worked last time. Maybe it’d work this time. She nodded.

  It seemed their tactic wouldn’t get a chance. Lyon blinked out of existence once again and reappeared standing by Nick, having closed the ten feet between them in a split second. The taller man grabbed him by the back of the hoodie and yanked him off balance. Nick screamed and fought, but there was little her friend could do. Lyon looked barely affected by Nick’s attempts to punch him or kick at his legs. The impacts were hitting, but they weren’t doing any good. Lyon was inhumanly strong and simply picked Nick up off the ground via the back of his hoodie.

  Lydia reached to try to grab Nick—or shove Lyon—but it was a useless attempt. Lyon simply backhanded her across the chest, sending her sprawling to the ground. It hadn’t been a hard blow. It did nothing but sit her square on her ass. Something told her if he had wanted to crack her ribs with that hit, he could have.

  Nick was now screaming and thrashing and struggling as best as he could, kicking and punching at the taller man. He was in a violent, full-fledged panic.

  Lyon merely reeled his arm back and threw Nick head first through the black hole in space. Nick screamed, but the sound broke off into silence the instant he passed through the gap. Lydia stared, stunned, and waited. Waited for anything to happen. Waited for Nick to come back out. Waited for Nick to come falling out the other side. There was only silence.

  Nick was gone.

  Now, it seemed like it was her turn. She realized Lyon had swiveled to face her and was walking toward her over the grass of the park. Oh, no—no—she was not going through that hole.

  Lydia could no longer worry about her friend, or she was going to be right behind him. Scrambling up to her feet, Lydia took off running in the other direction. She didn’t care which way she was going. She didn’t care if she wound up at home or in Arlington. Hell, she’d run straight to New Jersey. It didn’t matter. She just needed to run away.

  She made it about fifty feet to the edge of the park before rounding a corner to turn down a street. What she saw, standing in the center of the paved road, facing her down and blocking her path, sent her staggering. Her terror-inspired inertia sent her toppling over and crashing to the ground, sprawling hard onto the pavement.

  On the list of recent events that were straight from a horror movie, this one was madness. This was insanity. Everything else, Lydia would accept eventually after a lot of alcohol and therapy. But what standing in the middle of the road was hopelessly unimaginable.

  It was him.

  The man in the suit of armor.

  She couldn’t imagine that there were two of them, wandering around in the intricate and deadly armor. Carrying the same sword.

  He was standing there, right in the center of the road, dark and empty eye sockets turned on her. After a pause, he began walking toward her in no hurry. When he moved, the tip of his sword nearly touched the ground. He was like a nightmare, walking through the dark city street.

  He was dead. Lydia had shot him. She had put a bullet straight through his brain. This wasn’t possible. She had to scrub his blood out of her coat.

  There weren’t words for any of what she felt. Lydia just sat, dumbly, staring at the man in the suit of demonic armor. There was nothing she could do but sit there, a lump of limbs on the ground. Lydia couldn’t process what she was seeing. She had killed him.

  It was too late to run now, too late to get up and take off. And for what? What purpose would it serve? They’d just catch up to her. They had Nick. She had cut the symbol off her arm, and it’d shown right back up on her other arm.

  Hopelessness struck her for the first time all day. She didn’t even have a weapon anymore.

  The monster in the armor finally stopped to stand at her feet. His sword vanished from his hand, seeing that she was no threat. He used that hand to reach down to her. Lydia could only let out a small squeak of fear as he wrapped a giant, gauntleted hand around her left forearm. With no effort, he hefted her to her feet and set her back down like she weighed nothing. As he did, he squeezed down on the fresh wound on her arm. She cried out as a stabbing pain lanced up her arm when he unwittingly put pressure on her wound.

  The armored man’s head tilted to the side, surprised at the sound she made. He set her down on her feet and opened his hand, looking down at her forearm in his grasp. The wound was under her coat sleeve, and with his free hand, he pushed the fabric up to her elbow, revealing the bloody bandage on her arm.


  The man sighed deeply in disgruntled annoyance, and it sounded like it came from inside a hollow cavern inside his helmet. When she looked up at him, it was impossible to know what he was thinking.

  “Are you Edu…?” Lydia asked.

  The man nodded once.

  “Didn’t I shoot you?”

  Edu nodded again.

  “Didn’t I kill you?”

  Another silent nod.

  “Please, let me go,” she asked, having not done that yet. Maybe he’d say it was all a mistake, apologize for the inconvenience, and let her go. No, he wouldn’t. But it was worth a try. There wasn’t any other tactic for her to try.

  The man shook his head. He grasped her by her other wrist, leaving her bandaged arm alone. It seemed he didn’t want to hurt her, and for that, at least, she was grateful. The man turned to stand perpendicular to her and with his other hand gestured out in front of him in the same way Lyon had done.

  Lydia jumped back in surprise as much as she could, with Edu grasping her by the arm, as a small black dot appeared hovering in space next to them. She watched, dumbfounded, as it widened into the same nothingness she had seen before.

  Edu began to walk toward it, and her terror took over again. Lydia tried to dig her heels in and pull back the other way, but it was like fighting the tide. He was a truck of a man, and even if he had been human, he would be far stronger than she was.

  She could feel something on her skin, like the buzz from a Van de Graaff machine. Her hair stood up on end the closer she got. Something told her this was a one-way trip.

  Edu stepped through first, and it was like watching her hand get sucked into a sawmill, with the rest of her strapped into the track. It didn’t hurt. It felt like she had put her arm in a current of water.

  She tried desperately to fight it. Frantically, she attempted to keep her head out of that inky blackness. But the grip on her wrist hadn’t lessened, and before she could even muster a scream, it overtook her. And the world was gone.

  Chapter Five

  Was she dreaming? Or was this real? The events of the day had thrown the distinction between the two severely into question.

  Lydia had no memory of getting here. She had no clue where “here” was and no idea how she wound up standing in the center of some strange stone room. Last she knew, she had been dragged through a gate in space by a hulking man in full armor. As she turned her head, she felt strangely detached from the movement. Looking down at her arm, there was no wound there, no hastily bandaged patch of skin where she had futilely tried to remove the mark. A dream, then. A nightmare, by the looks of things.

  She was in a mausoleum.

  Every surface of the walls was carved with detail that made it almost impossible to see it for what it was. Monsters and creatures tangled in a bloody feast among stone vines that seemed to wind around each other with no rhyme or reason. Columns arched up into a vaulted ceiling filled with cryptic symbols and more of the twisted vines. Stained glass windows dominated the walls, but no light shone through them to give Lydia any clue as to what they might depict.

  A winged and hooded statue stood on a dais at the head of the rectangular room, almost like an altar. Its wings were not made of feathers, but bones, as if someone had plucked every feather from an angel. In its grasp was a bowl, in which burned several black candles.

  The warm flicker of the wax tapers joined many of their peers, sitting in candelabras that dotted the eerie and solemn décor of the crypt. The room seemed built to honor one fixture in particular. A large stone sarcophagus dominated the center of the room. Oddly enough, it had no lid. Or at least one wasn’t anywhere to be found. She couldn’t see into the rectangular chamber in the center to see who—or what, she amended—was lying inside.

  Maybe it was empty.

  Yeah, right.

  Curiosity burned in her. It demanded to know what was in that coffin, what kind of monster was lying in there that was going to jump out at her. If this was like any of her other monster dreams, it was inevitable. She’d walk up, it’d jump out, she’d run away, and so on. The setting might be unique, but the setup certainly wasn’t.

  This was just a dream, after all—wasn’t it?

  Lydia walked up to the enormous stone sarcophagus in the center of the room. Amber candlelight flickered off the shining, obsidian surface. The whole thing looked carved out of one gigantic piece of the black, smooth rock. On each of the four posts were monsters and twisting demons caught in snarling and strange poses. It was beautiful, in a nightmarish kind of way. It looked like a style one might find in Versailles, but twisted, warped, and decidedly morbid. Whoever was in this tomb was important; she could tell that much. Or at least they thought they were and had enough money or resources to back it up.

  It was a dream, she reminded herself. This was her mind, blasting her through a fantasy nightmare of her waking horrors. It was just another creation of her exhausted, fear-consumed brain. She had been chased by so many monsters today, it was simply making up another one.

  Then why did this feel more concrete than that? More real? A few times in her life, Lydia had lucid dreams. They felt more like visions, being able to fly around her mind and rescript events or replay things she wanted to see again.

  Stepping up onto the low single stair that raised the sarcophagus ten inches off ground level, she began to lean forward to peer into the center of the coffin. It was dark, and the shadows made it nearly impossible to see at first.

  She expected a twisting mass of tentacles or some bony, bloody creature, snarling up at her. What she saw instead, was…a man.

  He was clothed in a suit that looked as though it dated from the early nineteenth century, all in patterns of black-on-black-on-black. Tailored and carefully made to fit his form perfectly. The coloring made him hard to see against the obsidian coffin. To make matters worse, his face was covered in a black, smooth metal mask.

  It was free of any features except for one circular hole over his right eye, from the bottom of which was etched a straight line downward that bisected his cheek and ran to the jawline, looking as though it cut through the surface. Neither the gap in the mask nor the hole for his eye revealed anything underneath. It was like there was a black gauze or netting. His other eye was concealed entirely and was as smooth as the rest of the mask.

  The only pale skin she could see was at the barest parts of his temples or the underside of his chin and his neck. Long black hair pooled around his head on a silk pillow.

  His hands were folded over his chest. One in a glove—black like the rest of what he was wearing—the other clad in a metal gauntlet, looking like the claw of some great beast. It shone in the light, detailing the intricate etchings that ran over the surface. The tips of the fingers ended in wicked, painfully sharp-looking claws.

  It took her a long moment to realize his chest was rising and falling a slow, deep pattern. This man wasn’t dead—he was asleep.

  Lydia swallowed thickly.

  She should run.

  She should turn and run.

  This man was obviously not someone to be tangled with. He was a monster, lying in repose, ready to strike. Lydia knew it. But something about him made her unable to look away. Made her too curious to bolt, somehow drawn in by him.

  Lydia was dreaming, she reminded herself. This was only a nightmare. Just the convoluted mess of her subconscious mind, summoning up this bizarre man in a strange crypt.

  It was that false sense of safety that led her to reach her hand slowly down to touch his smooth metal mask.

  She should have known better.

  Just before her fingers touched the surface, the clawed hand snapped around her wrist. It clamped down around her like a steel trap.

  Lydia screamed.

  ***

  Light reflecting off a glass cylinder filled with bubbling liquid was the first thing she found herself looking at. The movement was fascinating, the constant, repetitive rise of bubbles drifting upward before disappear
ing. It was both lulling her into, and drawing her out of, an unconscious state.

  It all felt like a dream. Even more so than wherever Lydia just was a second ago. It was easy to believe that was true, looking at that tube of glass with the bubbling liquid. Why was it she felt like she was in some sort of medical lab? What was it about the smell in her nose that reminded her of a hospital?

  Lydia remembered a hole in space. Maybe she had been hallucinating that and the rest of her awful day. Maybe she had a brain tumor or scarlet fever. Really, which way would she rather have it? That this was real or fake?

  The sharp smell in the air reminded her of sterilizers and rubbing alcohol. The scent woke her up. She must have passed out again the moment she had closed her eyes.

  “Ah. Good evening,” said a man’s voice, one she didn’t recognize. It took a long time for her to manage to lift her head and even longer to realize what it was she was looking at.

  The man in front of her looked like a nightmare straight out of one of her favorite movies. He was wearing a mask, but not a normal medical or surgical mask. This one looked more like something you’d wear to a masquerade ball. It covered maybe the top thirty percent of his face, covering one eye down to his cheekbone, then crossing up over the bridge of his nose and then up to his hairline, leaving his other eye exposed. There was nothing visible through the single eye hole of the mask, exactly like the man in her dream a moment ago. The surface of the mask was a dark purple matte-painted finish, with more of those strange symbols and writing, etched in black.

  The one eye she could see was a sharp and unnatural yellow. What she could see of his face was handsome, but austere. Aloof and unapproachable. Thin lips were pressed into the expression of a man who was wondering exactly how hard she was about to make his life.

  He wore a white linen smock, and it was spattered with liquids of various colors. Luckily, none of it looked like fresh blood. For the moment, anyway. Anything was fair game at this point. But that, sadly, was not the worst of it. The man, nightmarish as he might be, wasn’t what was making the recently recurring and familiar feeling of terror rise in her chest.