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The pain ceased, and Dax slumped to the floor, breathing heavily, his façade flickering between full reaper and human. Fortunately, Bruce had turned and was walking toward his factor. Before anyone could see, he pulled himself together and settled his image on the skeleton in Dax’s clothes.
Bruce’s head snapped toward the entrance into his private zoo as a scream shattered the silence. Overhead, rats ran over the glass roof in waves to descend down the side. One skittered over Dax’s hand, stopping to look up at him. Their relief had arrived.
Chapter Nine
Rats flooded into the solarium, squeaking and scrabbling about. A gunshot rang out from the hallway, and then silence after another scream. Bruce and his factor looked around, eyes desperate.
“Guards! What’s happening? Guards!” Bruce yelled.
Shaking his head to jog himself into action, Gabriel placed his hand over his ear and spoke into a hidden mic like he was a secret service agent.
While they were distracted, Dax rose up on shaky legs. Drawing in his calm, he let the last of his human appearance—his clothes—slip away to be replaced by the black tattered robes of the Grim Reaper. Standing to his full height, he reached out with his empty hand and pulled his scythe from out of the aether. With a quick check at the ceiling of the cage, he expanded until his head nearly touched the bars.
“Bruce DeForbes IV…” Dax pushed all the creepy, dark disharmonics into his words. The plants shivered at his voice as it echoed off the hard glass and walls.
Bruce fell backwards onto his butt and tried to back away in a wobbly crab walk. Reaching out, Dax wound Bruce’s life thread around his finger and yanked. A ragged yelp escaped Bruce’s lips as he fell backwards onto his back and twitched.
Too angry and annoyed to make a speech, Dax drew back his scythe and brought it around in a devastating swing as he forced his power into the jagged and notched blade of his infamous weapon. When it made contact with the cage, the blade sliced through the bars and ignited them as if they were tissue paper before the torch.
Dax raised a hand and inhaled, drawing in more power and shoved it out, obliterating the rest of his prison.
Bruce held up his hands to stop Dax. “Please… Please, I didn’t… I I I didn’t…know.”
From a door Dax hadn’t seen, a handful of guards burst into the Solarium, leveling guns at him as they stopped just inside the door.
“Shoot, you fools!” Gabriel pointed at Dax as he backed away hastily.
Shots rang out and splattered into the foliage around Dax, spraying plant debris around. The plants undulated in waves as the rats ran towards their guards. They backed away from the new unseen threat, then the one nearest the edge of movement screamed as rats swarmed up his legs and over his body. He swatted ineffectually at them until he fell under their weight. Frozen in fear, three more guards were quickly swarmed.
Only two guards remained. One turned and sprinted out the door they’d just entered. The other screamed and sprayed bullets at the waves of rats swarming toward him, no doubt hitting those who’d fallen before him. One guard’s thread snapped. And the other threads were near to snapping, frayed almost beyond their ability to bind soul to body.
Dax stepped out of the confines of the ashes that had been his cage, stalking slowly toward Bruce. “You have deprived innocent beings of their freedom. Kept them caged for your amusement. The very threads of your rot wind through this city and create misery, pain, and death.” Until that moment, Dax hadn’t decided how he wanted to deal with the man, but with one slice, he could stop one vein of corruption and free who knew how many beings held against their will.
He raised a hand, leveling a boned finger at the billionaire. “You have wasted your life. And now it is time for it to end.”
“Please, I don’t want to die. Name your price. I’ll do anything. Have mercy.” Bruce tried to force his face into some semblance of contriteness.
“Death is mercy.”
Dax brought the huge scythe around and cut Bruce DeForbes IV in half. When the vile man’s life thread snapped against the blade, Dax laughed, the dry, spooky sound causing every living being in the solarium to shiver and cower.
Bending over, he snatched the chain with its pouch from the hand of the severed torso. As he stood, Tomi and Boudreaux burst into the solarium from the door they’d been escorted out of.
Boudreaux stopped, pressing his back against the wall as he fumbled in the collar of his shirt for something. “Chango protect your soldier…”
“Boudreaux, it’s OK. Dax won’t hurt us.”
“Dax? That ain’t the scrawny white man… That’s death” Boudreaux raised a shaky hand to point across the room.
Ignoring them, Dax turned and stalked down the central path toward the cage that held the fae beast. It looked like some sort of demon dog with leathery skin flaps flaring out from the side of its head as it hissed sinisterly at him like the spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park. Though unlike a dog, dark red scales the color of coagulating blood covered the beast. Its tongue flared, drool dripping from what amounted to sucker covered mouth tentacle. Backing away until its butt neared the end of the cage, it stopped with a small yelp. A growl that would have dropped a human to their knees rumbled up from deep within its chest. Soulless hunger burned in its eyes.
Dax tossed back his head and laughed. “You do not frighten me. You feast on death, but I am he who devours all.”
Casting baleful flames into his eyes, Dax slowly moved his head lower. The beast yipped and crouched onto its belly, whimpering. Tomi stopped near Dax. Somehow, he’d talked Boudreaux off the wall, though he stood a good fifteen feet behind Tomi, holding a gris-gris bag in his fist as he mumbled invocations to the lwa. Dax caught a few familiar names mentioned every now and then as he repeated his litany.
Dax let his mind slip into the world of threads, seeking a certain one. When he found it, he coiled the thread around his finger and tugged gently. Nearby, Rory squeaked and stepped out from behind a tree.
“Tomi.” Dax chucked his head toward Rory.
