head of myself killing David, taking his head right off with one of the puppets’ axes, and taking his place. I wouldn’t become a diseased wreck like him. I was strong, so much stronger than the boy, and the shadow and I could defeat Miko together. And then we could rescue my men and leave the town. I could have anything I wanted, and with the shadow’s power, nobody could stop me.
It was a compelling vision, all right, and for two milliseconds I might have even believed it.
“I hate Miko with the white-hot passion of a thousand burning suns,” I whispered, crouching down on the ledge. The surface of the sludge was bulging slightly; I knew the shadow was right there below me. “But you know what?”
I whipped off my glove and plunged my flaming hand into the sludge, and as the shadow shrieked inside my head, I pulled us both into my hellement.
I was standing in my old bedroom, and before me was what looked like an overturned five-gallon bucket of raspberry jelly, only it sure didn’t smell like any fruit you’d want to eat. It didn’t have any visible eyes or mouth or any other features, but the thing shuddered as if it were startled, disoriented.
“I hate slimy, parasitic little devils like you a whole lot more,” I told it.
The jelly shrieked and whipped spiky pseudopods at my legs. I jumped backward onto the bed to dodge the swipe, rolled across the mattress, and landed on the other side. The jelly was sprouting pseudopods everywhere, the red tentacles shooting up to stick to the ceiling, the walls, lifting the boneless body up off the ground as the jelly separated in the middle, forming a toothy, noxious maw. Worse, the jelly was swelling, growing, apparently feeding off the dark energies that still irradiated the hellement.
“That was a nasty trick, bringing me here,” the jelly said in its little-girl voice. “I’m going to kill you for it.”
My sword and shield were by the dresser where I’d left them; I snatched them up barely in time to slash at a pair of pseudopods shooting at me from across the bed. The cut pseudopods retreated, whipping away, spraying me with ichor that sizzled painfully on my face and arms. The jelly was growing so quickly that in a few minutes it would surely suffocate me with its sheer bulk.
“If you kill me, how are you going to get out of here?” I yelled, trying to ignore the pain from my acid burns.
My question registered, and seemed to stymie it for just a minute. I quickly blinked through several gemviews with my ocularis, hoping I’d see something … and there it was: a pulsing heart in the middle of the gooey mass.
There was no time to waste. I launched myself back across the bed at the monster and rammed my left arm right into its soft body. Instantly my flesh was burning, my skin melting, and the creature was shrieking, whipping my back and arms with its pseudopods, and I knew I’d be dead in just a few seconds if I didn’t kill it. Right before the nerves in my hand died, I felt my fingers close on its nasty little heart and I gave a hard jerk, pulling it free. The pseudopods went slack, and the jelly fell to the floor with a tremendous splat.
I staggered backward into the dresser. My left hand was nearly skeletal, and the blue-black heart slipped from my fingers onto the floor. The organ sprouted centipede legs and started to scurry back to the jelly mass, presumably to regenerate the monster. I took careful aim with my sword and speared it right to the floorboards. The heart spasmed around the blade, then began to disintegrate into a nasty gray liquid. The jelly body, too, was decaying to a pool of sour blood on the floor.
Once the burst of adrenaline subsided, I realized that my left arm was in tremendous pain, and the acidic ichor was continuing to eat its way through my flesh and bone. Time to leave. I hopped over the puddle and opened the red portal door with my good hand.
The return to my body was disorienting and unpleasant. I couldn’t see; there was a thick, stinging liquid in my eyes. My face was wet and sticky, and there was blood and something else in my mouth. I spat it out, just as a dozen death-memories hit me, and I spent the next few minutes