Bottle Demon by Stephen Blackmoore

Author:Stephen Blackmoore [Blackmoore, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The conference room is empty save Gabriela and me. She kicked out the zombie and the woman. The woman was slightly amused, like this was all a game, which to her it could be as far as I know. The zombie wasn’t happy about it, though. Didn’t push it when Gabriela ordered him out the door. He walked past giving me this look that says ‘You do anything and I’ll kill you.’ Yeah, try it, dead man, let’s see which one of us wins.

I sit on the other side of the table from Gabriela. I don’t want to go near her. I don’t trust myself not to try to kill her. Because if we start that business it’s only going to end when one of us is a corpse.

She matches my glare with a calm, cool gaze. Gabriela does what needs doing and meets everything head on. She does not flinch. She does not crack. I’ve only seen her at the edge of that once before. She almost died then, but she did it knowing full well she might, and the stakes were too high not to do it.

We sit in silence like that for a full ten minutes before she says, “You gonna keep being a fucking drama queen about this or are we gonna talk?”

“By all means,” I say. “Please. Talk. Tell me why you decided to shear me into pieces and cram all the really choice bits into somebody else’s dead body. Tell me the rationale. Tell me why you thought it was a good idea. And tell me why you thought I would even be remotely okay with it.”

“I knew you wouldn’t,” she says. “I knew it would piss you off. I knew how it was going to work and what it was going to do to you. I was pretty sure it was irreversible and that if it did work whoever woke up in that circle might not even be the person I was trying to get back.”

“And am I who were hoping for?”

“The fact that you tried to kill Pallavi back there tells me I got it right.”

“Am I that predictable?”

“Sometimes,” she says. “Yes.” Gabriela may not always have a plan, but she always has a reason. She doesn’t do anything without considering multiple angles, possible outcomes. I push aside my anger as far away as I can and start using my head.

“Whether I like it or not, I know that you wouldn’t have done this unless you needed something that only I could do,” I say. “Which is why I’m sitting here and not murdering you. It also tells me that it’s about Darius. Nobody else can touch those wards on his bottle except for Mictlantecuhtli.”

“And since you’re Mictlantecuhtli—”

“Except that I’m not,” I yell, and I can feel my eyes turn black. “Or did you not hear that bit about splitting me into pieces? Mictlantecuhtli and I are now officially and on some fundamental cosmic level no longer the same person.”

“Huh,” she says.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.