No Place Like Hell Read Online Free PDF

you?"
    "I still wore the flesh when they arrived at Clark's Books moments after me."
    Seve smoothed the tablecloth. "How did they know to come?"
    "Silent alarm, the pigs said. It was a trap. He set me up to look responsible. But why? It wouldn't save him."
    "Blood and sacrifice," the demon muttered.
    "Exactly."
    The demon's eyes widened. "It was a sacrifice ? Decker didn't die of natural causes?"
    "There were runes drawn on the floor and imbued with power. A bewitched blade was used to cut the soul free. The magic carried a trace of Holmes."
    Seve sucked in a breath. "Decker and Holmes are linked?"
    Kasker nodded.
    "Did Decker fight?"
    "No sign of it."
    "The blade, it was white? And the runes spiral out to a portal?"
    Kasker stared at the demon. "To the back door. You've heard of this?"
    "Si, many years ago. I thought the knowledge lost."
    "Is it of the angels? Why would they save a man like Decker?"
    "No, sabueso, of the universe , and therefore much more dangerous, especially in the hands of a soul like Holmes."
    Seve sat back in the padded seat and sipped his coffee while Kasker considered what the demon had said. Magicks loose in the world… they could have consequences greater than the salvation or damnation of a few souls.
    "What do you know?"
    Seve blotted his lips with a white linen napkin. "The ritual severs the binding and frees the soul."
    Kasker chafed at the demon's reply. This much he knew already. "So the soul escapes into nothingness instead of being swallowed by Hell. Humans cling to their lives. They would agree to die this way to escape their fate?"
    The demon put his fingertips against his temples. "The soul still yearns for existence. The rune path guides it in a search for new blood, new flesh."
    "The loosed soul has the power to kill?" Kasker asked. He wiped a wrist across his forehead.
    "No, no. It is weak and blind. It seeks warm, unoccupied flesh, just as we do when we manifest here. There may have been a second sacrifice nearby, one that prepared a new vessel for occupation. Did you sense it?"
    Kasker frowned at the table and thought back to the night before. "How near?"
    "In the past, the receptacle waited on the other side of the door."
    "If Holmes sacrificed another so Decker could take its flesh, it had to be done near the bookstore. I sensed no dispossessed souls in the alley, and I would have smelled Holmes if he were nearby."
    Kasker rubbed a hand across his mouth and wondered if that were true. He'd broken the rules and taken the flesh because he'd been unable to trace Holmes since his escape from Hell. He'd caught whiffs of his prey in the Solaris area, but never enough to track. How was Holmes hiding the scent of his damnation?
    "Then perhaps the transfer was unsuccessful and the universe has taken the soul owed me. If this was Holmes' first attempt to wield the power, he may not have mastered it yet."
    "How does Holmes come by this knowledge?" Kasker asked.
    The demon pushed his coffee cup away. "There is a tome, thought destroyed. The freeing of souls is but one secret it illuminates. Great harm can be done with the knowledge in it. Perhaps even the unmaking of Heaven and Hell. To find it, you must seek answers from another, one who stands outside our paradigm."
    Kasker shifted on the bench. "I'm a simple hunter. Saving Heaven and Hell is beyond my purpose."
    "You are sabueso del infierno, the greatest hunter in Heaven, Hell, or the universe. The one who can help will not wish to be found, but no one is better qualified than you to locate the Oracle."

7
     
    My feet ached, and I wished Mayor Newell would get on with it. The conference room at the hospital was hot and stuffy. Antiseptic tainted the air and burned my nostrils. We stood on a low stage at the front of the windowless room. A bevy of reporters and photographers gathered before us, jostling for places in the front row.
    Dave and I were to the mayor's left. His son sat in a wheelchair to his right. No way the mayor would allow