THE MAN IN Black stepped off the giant skull of his dead uncle god. He pranced toward us, puddles of gore splish-splashing around his feet. A smile cut his face in half, and he rubbed the crystal on his coat like an apple he planned to take a bite from.
A mad gleam shone in his eye.
I stepped closer to Daniel, and he stepped closer to me until our hands found each other. It felt like we were circling the wagons.
The Man in Black stopped in front of us. He stretched like a cat, arms up, back arched, on his tippy-toes with his head tilted at an odd angle. He moaned as a series of quiet cracks ran in a chain from inside him.
He dropped down, flat-footed.
“Well, that was almost too easy.” His eyebrow arched sharply as he looked at me. “It was as if he were distracted.”
Daniel’s hand tightened on mine. “Why would you say that?”
“Oh, I do not know, the Lord of R’yleh may have been many things”—his fingers stroked the air as if looking for these things—“dull, single-minded, sentimental…” He ticked them off one by one on his left hand, the human one. “… but he was not a … what is your human word? Oh yes, he was not a bitch, and he should not have gone down like one.”
“Does it matter how you stopped him?”
“It matters if my Acolyte has designs to turn against me because of something she was told.”
My heart stopped beating.
He knows.
Daniel tensed, moving just slightly forward, between me and the Man in Black. “They didn’t talk. He didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t say anything to him.”
“You know nothing.” Nyarlathotep plucked at a tattered piece on the edge of his coat, capturing it between two red, skinless fingers. He pulled it slowly, tearing it from the rest of the coat in one long, drawn-out rip.
I felt its pain as a faint echo in my head.
Laying the strip of coat against the jewel in his hand, he began to wind it around, stretching it as he went. He didn’t look when he spoke, but his words were aimed at me. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Pulling the strip into a loop, he hung the jewel around his neck beside the one from the Cancer God. They rubbed against each other, the crystalline planes and corners chinking and squeaking in protest. The colors in each of them whipped into a frenzy, rushing toward the other jewel and then darting away, like living, liquid energy trapped in a prism of quartz.
“Liar, liar pants on fire.” He stopped. “Well, not literally. Not yet.”
“We fulfilled our part of this deal. Let us walk away now.”
His tongue clucked the roof of his mouth. “Tut-tut-tut, Acolyte. That was not the bargain struck.”
“Yes, it was.”
Dark eyes glowed. He licked his lips. When he opened his mouth his voice had changed. Daniel’s voice came from the Man in Black’s throat. “Name your price, and we’ll pay it.”
Oh no.
“I name my price, Daniel Alexander Langford.” The Man in Black’s smile widened, teeth gleaming in the dim luminescence of the cave. “That price is your life.”
Before I could move, he fell on Daniel in a swirl of black coat. In a blink, they were gone.
I screamed, the only person left alive in that dank, subterranean pit.