Hell Away from Home (The Devil's Daughter Book 5) Page 2

  “You don’t sound convinced,” Dooly said. “What are you afraid of?”

  “If Marjory Laroque can summon dragons, the Cormorant—as hell’s self-appointed deity—must have noticed.”

  Dooly steadied herself against the door to the abandoned bar. “Are you afraid of what Nocturne said out at the airport about a war coming?”

  Hell’s politics had a nasty way of sucking Doodlebug into their conflicts. “If the balance of power is shifting toward her opponent, the Cormorant is sure to act.”

  “And his offer of you joining forces? Sere’s not going to be happy about you siding with Jennifer’s mirror.”

  Doodlebug understood the problem all too well. As a doppelgänger herself, being Dooly’s shadow in hell was a constant battle between self-will and giving in to the dictates of the real girl’s actions. Jennifer, the unsuspecting housewife in life who was indirectly responsible for Sere’s doppelgänger body, probably didn’t even know about her connection to the Cormorant. What no one in life seemed to fully grasp was that doppelgängers weren’t just mindless puppets. Taking the reproduction body to house Sere’s soul stolen from the afterlife had cast Jennifer’s mirror spirit into the first available creature—thus creating the doppelgänger-bird hybrid who considered herself hell’s goddess. “The connection of those three aren’t my problem. All Sere asked me to do was keep the demons from escaping.”

  “How are you going to find out what the women are up to?” Sometimes Dooly could sound exactly like an annoying little sister pestering Doodlebug with questions.

  “If this isn’t the first outbreak of dragons, someone has to have seen them. I just have to be careful who I ask. I don’t need that birdwoman pecking around after me.”

  “Drop me a note when you know something.” Dooly picked up her fedora from the stained, busted-up concrete sidewalk and adjusted it on her head to hide the band of terrycloth.

  With their connection concluded, Doodlebug slipped her own headband off and stashed it in the leather pouch she kept against her chest. Since she wasn’t facing imminent danger, she would just as soon keep her thoughts to herself. She fired up the motorcycle and squeezed it between the overlapping concrete partitions. Ahead of her, charred vehicles and sizzling asphalt pointed a finger of destruction back to the city. “That big dragon sure has a way of making a first impression.” Talking to herself—a potential sign that she was losing it—helped make the ideas real for her. If a thought only existed in her mind, she could never be certain it hadn’t been one of Dooly Buell’s flights of fancy.

  Doodlebug bolted out of her protection and blasted back toward the city.

  2

  As Doodlebug wove her way down the recently melted and re-solidified asphalt, Dooly’s final comment to ‘drop her a note’ rattled around in her head. Anyone listening in would assume it had been a throw-away comment—like saying write when you find work—but Doodlebug knew better. Their shared hidden diary was the most secure method they had of communicating with each other. Even their shared thinking over the headband, whose signal passed through Professor Yates’s equipment, might be intercepted by the gang of busybodies that surrounded Sere. Dooly usually trusted the fools in life even if Doodlebug didn’t. By hinting at the information bypass, Doodlebug had to assume Dooly had finally come around to her paranoid way of thinking.

  Doodlebug processed the idea out loud to herself. “Dooly has to believe Marjory Laroque has infiltrated deeper into the professor’s equipment than we had suspected, and that’s not an idea she would have come up with on her own. That means Sere and her gang are questioning the equipment.” With Andy decapitated, the gang in life had diligently been seeking out what mischief he had created in the professor’s software before his all-too-timely demise at Doodlebug’s sword.

  She hit the gas in frustration. Even as a plank in Marjory Laroque’s bridge of the damned, Doodlebug had no way of knowing how deep the malware she was unintendingly a part of had infiltrated into the software that ran hell. The fact that Sere hadn’t mentioned the security breach could only mean she didn’t trust Doodlebug. “I’m being played by all sides.”

  She downshifted for the French Quarter exit. The bike’s speed and the storm’s power washing had driven the goblin gore and smell of burnt asphalt from her hair and clothes. “No point in returning to the hotel.”

  Though in the Quarter, Doodlebug could call on her contingent of gutter-punk doppelgängers to update her on anything strange. Getting word on the goings-on in the upscale Garden District was nearly impossible. Doppelgänger or real, one economic reality remained the same; New Orleans’s rich and poor mixed as well as French truffle oil and Bourbon Street drain water.

  She hopped the motorcycle up the wide stairs of the convention center. Empty buildings provided good places to think. Since a real person needed to live in New Orleans long enough for the professor’s equipment to model them—and continue staying in the city to make the effort worthwhile—the creepy building frequented by tourists in life seldom saw a doppelgänger visitor in hell. She pulled the Honda under the long entry overhang and shut down the engine.

  “Help me.” A small boy who looked to be no more than six years old was hiding behind a dumpster. She wished she’d kept driving. She didn’t need another responsibility dumped in her lap.

  “What are you doing out here?” Doppelgänger children seldom ventured beyond school playgrounds. Harvesters out for upgraded body parts desired by affluent doppelgängers usually left the underdeveloped beings alone because of their small limbs.

  “I’m lost.”

  “Now there’s an understatement. Any idea what happened to your parents?” She drew her sword. Outdoor conversations were a good way of attracting harvester attention.

  “They stepped into the building.”

  Humans could be such dipshits. For the boy to be hiding around the convention center, the real people in life were probably performing the same actions. “And they just left you out here?”

  “I wasn’t allowed in. They said it would only take a minute. I’m scared.” He trembled so badly that the wheels of the dumpster squeaked.

  Doodlebug suppressed her initial irrational compassion. Children needed to be hardened not coddled. Life wasn’t a place for the weak, and hell even less so, but that revelation didn’t change history. Before Dooly Buell had hit the streets, she’d been irrationally attached to the innocent little people. That ingrained compassion wasn’t something Doodlebug could shake, no matter how foolish it seemed. “Stay here. I’ll see what happened to them.”

  “Don’t leave me,” he pleaded.

  Though memories didn’t carry over from one regeneration to the next, Doodlebug could well imagine that she had sounded just as pathetic before her last jump to destruction. The scared teenager she’d been hadn’t had a chance against hell’s demons. Ghosts and goblins, harvesters and freaks.

  Her hell persona wanted to yell at the boy to toughen up, but Dooly’s heart from life, which all too often got in the way, wouldn’t let her. “It’ll be okay. I’ll just be a minute. Whatever I find, I promise we’ll get you back to your family. Be brave, little man.” She swung her leg off the bike then stashed two sickles in the woven belt of her army pants.

  Between the noise of the wind and the blacked-out windows of the main convention hall, Doodlebug found it impossible to detect what was going on inside. She pushed through the double doors with her hands on the knife handles, ready for action.

  The great hall looked like a cross between a medical triage unit and a meat market. Arms and legs hung from racks while drunk doppelgängers lay on tables with harvesters removing pieces of their bodies.

  A harvester walked through the ankle-deep water and blood. “Are you here to make a donation?” His open black cape revealed his blood-splattered leather skin that was stretched tightly over his bones.

  She’d heard of places like this one. Doppelgängers missing limbs were often safe from further harvester attacks. T
o keep the severed limb viable in the new host, the originating body had to be kept alive. As a matter of logistics, harvesters were hesitant to cut into the same body more than a few times. By showing up at a donation site, a doppelgänger could direct which body part to lose in the hope they would find some form of peace in the French Quarter. “You disgust me.”

  As if to confirm her assessment, the harvester licked blood from his curved blade. “Between our need to devour body parts for the power from life they contain and your rich brethren’s desire for upgraded limbs, we’re having trouble keeping up. Some of us believe it’s better to negotiate a trade than hunt down victims.”

  Doodlebug’s desire to yank the sickles from her belt and turn the surgery room into a killing floor nearly got the better of her. “At least out there, these doppelgängers have a level of protection. In here, they’re at your mercy.”

  He aimed his sickle at a bloody table loaded down with folders. “Once we take what we need, these beings won’t need your protection. We have a contract.”

  “Lying is one thing—contracts are another. Any document more than a few sentences long must contain clauses that don’t benefit the victims. I’ve seen the stumps.”

  The offices filled with cubicles containing armless, legless torsos kept alive just for their ability to transfer energy to their missing parts would forever haunt her. So long as the unfortunates didn’t crumble to dust, the body parts that had been transplanted to the vain, rich doppelgängers wouldn’t dissipate either. Back in the land of the living, the matching reals had to be experiencing the soul-sucking energy of the harvesters’ victims. The revelation of how far the fiends would go to collect their supply of parts, combined with witnessing Sere decapitate a harvester, had inspired Doodlebug to become the Doppel Avenger out to save every doppelgänger she could find.

  “We don’t do that anymore.”

  She’d had about as much as she could take. “I’m not here to learn about hell’s interpretation of law. There’s a kid outside. Turn over his parents, and we’ll be on our way.”

  A woman with a bandage over her flat chest hurried through the muck. “Is Harry okay?”

  “He’s scared. What were you thinking?”

  A man with a bloody stump where his arm had been and a leather patch over one eye followed the woman. “Just take us to our son.”

  The bonehead licked his chapped black lips. “You’ve bought a reprieve for your child. We will only hunt one of you—choose.”

  The man stood so straight Doodlebug wondered if the harvester had also removed some disks from his spine. “Hunt me. The boy needs his mother.”

  “What the boy needs is to toughen up.” Doodlebug hadn’t realized she’d spoken the words until the woman turned to her.

  While the husband and the harvester signed the contracts in blood, the woman remained with Doodlebug. “That’s why they’re hunting my husband and not me. I know what it is to live on the streets. With all of my limbs, I’ve got a better chance of taking care of Harry.”

  “If you’re familiar with harvester tactics, why would you agree to being harvested? This makes no sense.”

  From the way the woman ran her hands over the bandage, Doodlebug guessed her boobs must have been impressive. “There’s a rumor that a big event is about to happen in the Garden District. Anyone who can afford an upgrade is snagging the best body parts they can find. I was approached for my breasts. They said we’d get the best terms available.”

  Doodlebug didn’t feel sorry for the woman losing her boobs. Certain body parts had a tendency to get in the way when it came to fighting. “What’s the event?”

  “It’s an upscale party. The big part of the rumor is that the Cormorant is supposed to make an appearance.”

  Doodlebug felt her blood run cold. “Any idea where this soiree is to take place?”

  “The Laroque mansion.”

  She exited the building and got back on her motorcycle. With the family reunited, she couldn’t leave the doppelgänger processing plant fast enough.

  As she puttered through the streets of the Central Business District, Doodlebug considered what she knew of the bird deity. Not many in hell knew of the Cormorant’s history or actual identity, and the birdwoman had done everything in her power to keep it that way. “Jenna.” Even for Doodlebug, merely speaking the name aloud felt sacrilegious.

  Sere’s gang of supposed experts who were in charge of hell probably hadn’t meant for Doodlebug to eavesdrop on the conversation about what made Sere tick. As the original spirit cast out of Sere’s doppelgänger body and infused into the first animal they could find, they probably expected Jenna to just be happy she hadn’t been reincarnated as a cockroach. “Probably would have been easier on everyone if she had. I would just love to see the harvesters worshipping a big bug,” she said to herself.

  Of the human triptych, only Jennifer could get along on her own. No one would have thought that silly little housewife was the foundation of a whole religion and the superheroine capable of containing hell. “If Marjory and the Cormorant are joining forces, I’m screwed. I need to get into that party, but they aren’t going to let me in as the Doppel Avenger.”

  Other than fighting, though, there wasn’t much she was fit to do. Dooly Buell, on the other hand, could play a mean fiddle. Doodlebug toyed with the satchel between her breasts. If the professor’s computers were compromised, telling Dooly about the meeting over the system would mean both of them would be walking into a trap. She needed to sneak in without being identified then somehow figure out what the two powerful women were up to.

  Doodlebug patted the small leather bag back into place under her shirt. By not talking over the computer system, she just might throw Marjory off. “Looks like I need to sneak out to the cemetery.” Though like the headband, the blacked-out motorcycle might point her enemies right to her. She needed to stash it where no one would suspect she was back on foot, and that ruled out the hotel where she’d stayed. Trusted guards could too easily become informants.

  She snuck the Honda along the streets of the Central Business District until she came to a building being gutted for condo development. Though foremen, architects, and inspectors might be New Orleans residents, most of the construction workers were only in town for the job. She ducked down an alley behind the project. With no one around to see her, she wheeled the bike in the gaping hole of the building. She snugged the motorcycle up against a graffiti-painted cinderblock wall and covered it with a blue tarp.

  After the motorcycle was securely stashed, she hustled along the streets lined with towering office buildings. She kept her head down and her ratty rain slicker pulled tight as she avoided the well-dressed businesspeople.

  Once she crossed Canal Street, she skirted from overhanging balcony to protective awning along North Rampart. The Quarter was bad—worse than bad. A teenage girl sneaking into the sketchy part of town was simply begging for trouble. “Sure would have been nice if Professor Yates had screened the people he used for creating doppelgängers.” Rapists, thieves, and murderers were villainous enough before removing the final shreds of humanity and turning their demonic doubles loose in hell, and those were just the doppelgängers.

  Brick tenement buildings bordered three sides of the crumbling cemetery like old people looking through the windows of a medical office at the recently deceased. Built on top of the leveled Storyville red-light district, the area never had been one a young girl would’ve found comforting.

  Not that Doodlebug gave a rat’s ass about where Dooly hid her musings regarding life on the streets but being safe from Agnes Delarosa’s original rendition of hell made the journal immune from the professor’s tampering. Anything Doodlebug wrote on the pages remained even if she dissipated. Unfortunately, the fact that the crypt was immune from being overwritten also meant that recording any new information required Doodlebug to sneak past all manner of terrors.

  She hopped across North Rampart Street as easily as she’d done Canal
. With the streetcars racing along the neutral zone, the road was more a part of the Quarter than the Treme. Passing the old out-of-place adobe church was like seeing a caring old woman shake her head in disappointment at a girl entering a whorehouse.

  At Basin Street, Doodlebug crouched behind the back of the church with her swords drawn. Harvesters she understood, but even those demons stayed on their side of the busy street. “Ghosts and goblins, harvesters and freaks.” The message was as simple as the line: In hell, there was always something scarier than what she knew. “We really need to develop some better poets.”

  When it came to the cemetery and surrounding neighborhood, such an advance wasn’t possible. She consoled herself that the periodic sojourn helped keep her skills sharp. She needed to record what’s happening. The dragons couldn’t have randomly evolved, and that meant Marjory was messing with hell’s infrastructure. Other than the professor, she was the only one with the know-how. “Damn Baron Malveaux and his devil journals,” Doodlebug muttered to herself. Then there’s the party to consider. If the most powerful woman in New Orleans was joining forces with the Cormorant, Dooly was Doodlebug’s only hope of sneaking into the soiree.

  Strengthened with determination, Doodlebug jetted out from behind the church wall and ran as fast as her feet would carry her to the wrought-iron gate that faced the street. She bolted up the rusting bars and over the ornate header. Landing in the supposedly empty graveyard, however, didn’t mean she was in the clear.

  The tomb she sought was nestled deep within the city of the dead. The hammering rain howled between the brick and marble crypts, sounding like a choir of the damned. The dark, cold tombs surrounding her sapped her courage. Wafts of ice-cold air in the otherwise hot and muggy storm passed through her flesh and chilled her to the bone. “I friggin’ hate these ghosts. There’s no one to fight. All they do is steal life force.”