Free Beyond the Blue Moon (Forest Kingdom Novels) by Simon R. Green Page A

who gets to him first.”
    “Go for it,” said Fisher.
    They padded cautiously down the landing, listening carefully at each closed door. Their soft footsteps sounded dangerously loud in the quiet, but no one came out to investigate. And finally, at the third door, they heard a voice droning quietly. Hawk and Fisher shared a quick look and a nod. Hawk lifted his axe, but Fisher stayed him with a raised hand. She tried the door handle, and it turned easily. Fisher turned the handle as far as it would go, and then eased the door inward an inch. The hinges were mercifully silent. The air was sharp with tension, like the sea just before a storm breaks. Hawk counted down from three with his fingers, and then hit the door with his shoulder. The door flew open, and Hawk and Fisher charged into the room, weapons raised. Only to crash to a sudden halt as they saw who was waiting for them.
    The sorcerer was sitting cross-legged in midair, floating unsupported above a wide chalk-drawn pentacle on the bare wooden floor. Dressed in sorcerer’s black, he wore robes hung loosely about a lean, almost emaciated frame. His shoulders were still broad, but his large hands were just bone and skin, and they wavered unsteadily as they moved in slow mystical passes. The dark robes were stained and shabby, nowhere near as impressive as they had once been. The same could also be said of the sorcerer. His pale aquiline features were drawn and strained, and the dark, deep-set eyes were almost feverishly bright. He no longer shaved his head, and his hair had grown back in a dirty gray.
    He turned his head slowly to look at Hawk and Fisher, his thin mouth moving in something that might have been meant as a smile. Hawk’s first thought was that the sorcerer looked like a drug addict too long from his last fix. Squatting on the sorcerer’s left shoulder was a small bloodred demon, barely a foot high, with a pinched vicious face and flaring membranous wings. It hissed at Hawk and Fisher, then giggled nastily. A long, slender umbilical cord ran from the demon’s swollen belly to the sorcerer’s neck, where it plugged seamlessly into the prominent artery.
    “Hello, Hawk, Fisher,” said the sorcerer in an almost normal voice. “I knew it would be you who found me, if anyone.”
    “Hello, Gaunt,” said Hawk, not lowering his axe. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
    The sorcerer Gaunt had once single-handedly cleaned up the Devil’s Hook, killing all the villains, and made the place almost civilized for a while. But it all fell apart again after he was forced to leave Haven. A good man in a bad city, he’d drawn his considerable power from a succubus, a female demon he’d called up out of the Pit, and bound to him, at the cost of his soul. He’d used evil to enable him to do good, and had no right to be surprised when it all went horribly wrong. The succubus was destroyed, and Gaunt lost his power source. Hawk and Fisher saw it happen. Gaunt had been their friend, then.
    “Jesus, Gaunt,” said Fisher. “What the hell happened to you? And what the hell do you think you’re doing now?”
    “What I have to,” said Gaunt.
    “You look half dead,” said Hawk. “And what is that ugly thing squatting on your shoulder?”
    “My new source of power,” said the sorcerer. His voice was calm, almost emotionless. “After I lost my lovely angel, my succubus, most of my magic went with her. I couldn’t protect the Hook anymore, and all the scum I’d kept out came rushing back, wolves with endless appetites returned to prey on the innocent. So I left Haven, in search of new magic. But after what happened to the succubus, the only demons that would answer my call were nasty little shits like this one. It’s really no more than a parasite, feeding me magic in return for the life force it drains from me. Not the best of bargains to enter into, but I didn’t have much of a choice.”
    “From what I remember of your succubus,” said Hawk, “you’ve