Fear warred with pain and anger inside me. Fury won out, numbing the pain for a moment. “How long did you keep me away, you bastard?” With the blade, I ripped deep into the Dragon, twirling the sword and cutting, cutting, cutting, speaking scripture in spiritual warfare, not able to shout for the pain in my chest, my words rasping, “With the jawbone of an ass…have I slain…With the jawbone of an ass have I slain.” I felt the sword nick something inside, the density of an organ slowing the blade.
Azazel roared. Blood covered me and I withdrew the longsword to dash it from my face, the motion grinding broken ribs. Its blood didn’t stink or burn. The blood of Darkness was always foul and acidic. Doubt filled me, but it was way too late to rethink my choices. I redoubled my attack on its side. “With the jawbone of an ass have I slain.”
The conjures snapped off below us. With a swoop and a shift of its wings that jarred my bones and nearly pulled my shoulders from their sockets, Azazel braked and dropped through the rafters of the church. It—he—landed with a thump that made us both hiss. I had a feeling its landings were usually a lot more graceful. I had hurt it. Good. Because it had hurt me. Blackness hovered in my vision as I took small breaths, agony tripping through me.
I smelled succubus. Still held in the beast’s grip, I looked around at the walls, vastly changed. Days had passed. Surely days. The walls were glowing with strange, spiky energy patterns, the colors jaundiced and sickly. Silvery trails wound up and over everything, coating walls and floor and piles of rubbish with a shimmery substance. Snail tails. Huge, immense mama snail trails, a foot wide.
Crawling through the slime were things, four feet long and bulbous. I had never seen them before but I knew what they were. The smell alone told me. Succubus larvae. Lots of them. I regripped the bloodied weapons, ready for another attack, but the white-bodied pupae with strange, jointed bodies and blunt, black snouts didn’t attack.
The Dragon threw me. I crashed against a wall, cracking my elbow, grinding my ribs. I lost my blade. The femur bone cracked the wall beside me, thrown by the beast. I slithered through gunk collected at the base of the wall. It was a long moment before the haze of pain thinned and I was able to breathe.
I looked around, trying to orient myself. I was at the front entry of the destroyed church; with mage-sight, the sanctuary was alive with Darkness, larvae everywhere, but no Azazel.
Fear crawled around in my chest on its little spider legs, a feeling I was coming to hate. Above me, the shields snapped back in place, overlapping bubbles of power. The awful smells vanished. Poof. I remembered the overlapping conjures I had seen from the air, looking down on the church. Reality had changed while I was in the river of time. I had been gone longer than I thought. How long? And where was the beast?
In mage-sight, I spotted the glowing energies of the tanto and retrieved the blade, wiping slippery gunk off it and off my hands, gooing up the edge of my cloak. Having the blade made me feel immeasurably better. I sheathed the tanto and gripped my side gently, supporting the loose and grinding ribs.
“Thorn?”
A distinct mind opened to me, clinging, thoughts that smelled of roses in spring and the salt smell of the sea. “Rose?” I whispered, holding my side.
“Help. Help me!” she called, her mental voice a weak echo full of static and dark energies, as if she were far away. Her mind was a well of panic, fear like a storm blowing through it, lightning spiking. I couldn’t place her direction. I ripped at my amulets and held the Apache Tear away from me. I found the remembered mind. Close by. Very close. “Thorn!”
She was alive. “Rose!” I screamed, the sound croaking as agony speared me.
I turned, searching for her. Though I couldn’t smell it, I spotted the succubus queen. It was sitting on a pile of rock and brick, staring down at me, protected from me, separated from me by black motes of energy in a small circle of power, hiding behind a shield. The queen was once again in its human form, not Gramma, but the form of Jane Hilton, Lucas’ lady love, blond and green-eyed, so utterly beautiful she—no, it—should have been a seraph. It stared at me, hunger in its eyes, its hands on a body supine beside it.
“Thorn…” My thoughts were sucked beneath a wave of Rose’s pain. Unthinking, I dropped the Tear. Rose’s mind closed to me.
Blood coated the queen’s perfect jaw. Mage-blood. Rose’s blood. Jane licked its lips and bowed its head, its tongue flicking. It was drinking her blood.
Rage roared up. I pulled a throwing blade and stabbed the shield. Black sparks flew, but it was like hitting a diamond. My blade slid off. I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get to Rose. I sobbed, my broken ribs grinding. Throwing back my head, I screamed in rage, the shattered edges of my ribs stabbing together in torment, the agony slicing. Pain brought me back and dropped me breathless to my knees in the slime. Some still-sane part of me found and pressed the Apache Tear against my neck. Calm settled on me, and I took two shallow breaths, fumbling with the amulets in my necklace, searching for a weapon to get me through the shield.
I shoved an anticonjure amulet against the shield-wall, holding it against the energies. The scorched smell of burned leather rose from my gloves. The scent cleared the last of Rose’s panic from me. Resting in the icy slime, I pressed the Tear close as shame threaded through me.
Rose’s head rotated to me and her eyes met mine. Horror and panic were mirrored there, and her body quivered in minute waves of terror. Tears flowed through the grime on my twin’s face. “Thorn,” she mouthed at me, her words silenced behind the shield that was more than protection, stopping air flow and sound as well. I was a coward, but I couldn’t put away the Apache Tear again. I couldn’t bear Rose’s fear inside me. The succubus had her mouth at my twin’s neck, sucking. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Flames blinked into sight over me, dropping over my head, spinning in a fiery circle, stealing my night vision. They hissed words as they raced around me, plasma trails in the night. “Omega maggge,” they said. “Foretold one. Omega maggge.”
I crawled to my feet and stepped away from them, focusing on Rose. “If I’m so great a mage, then why can’t I conjure me some help?” I whispered, my feet slick on the snail trails.
A brilliant light snapped into space overhead, bathing the church in a dazzling radiance. The concussive movement of air from its arrival slammed against the shield and should have thrown me to my knees, but the Dark energies protected me. There was only one thing I knew that displaced that much air on arrival. A wheels. No way had there been time for it to answer my plea. Someone else had brought it here. Not good.
The Flames swirled in a climbing spiral, toward the wheels overhead. A shaft of light pierced the shield above me and the Flames swept through. The lights went out, the world going black, though there was no massive boom. I waited a beat, but the Flames didn’t return.
Feeling unaccountably betrayed, I drew the kris and the tanto, holding them ready. Stepping in a circle, I placed my feet carefully in the slime, trying to isolate various noises: my footsteps, rustling, a soughing that might be a distant wind. To compensate for my ruined night vision, I opened both mage-sight and a mind-skim. When I caught my balance and the resulting nausea settled, I looked around. The church glowed weirdly in the blended scan.
Out of the night, a voice groaned, saying, “Crap. That hurts.”
I closed my eyes as joy blossomed in me. I inhaled to call him and pain thrust deep, broken ribs stealing my breath, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t alone. Eli was just beyond a pile of rubble.
Chapter 21
Louder, Eli shouted, “What? No ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? Just drop me ten feet into a slime pit and take off? What’s the matter with you, you big ugly feathered fiend! You trying to kill us?”
“That’s a cherub, you young pup,” another voice said, creaky and strained. “We just got picked up and dumped in the church. Shut your yapper or it’ll blow us to electrons.”
For a moment, I couldn’t place the voice,
but I remembered Ernest Waldroup, the senior elder from Atlanta.
“Tears of Taharial, that hurts,” Thadd swore. “I broke a freaking wing.”
“What is this, old home week?” Rupert asked. “Audric?”
“Here. What happened?”
“Patience, brothers,” Shamus said. “When we rushed inside the sigil to take Thorn from the seraph, the wheels descended. And they took us up.”
“Like Elijah,” Jasper said, awe in his voice. “‘Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire,’” he said, quoting from the second book of Kings, “‘and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.’”
“We didn’t go very far for this to be heaven,” Rupert said.
“And if this is heaven, we got to talk to the cleaning crew,” Eli said. “Room fresheners, a little dusting, and a good vacuuming would do wonders.”
I couldn’t help my smile. I think if I were dying, Eli could make me smile. Come to think of it…I set the death thoughts aside. “How many of you are there?” I asked, my voice scratchy.
“Thorn?” Eli asked.
“Yeah.”
“Hot damn,” he said, fervently. “Where are you? You sound like crap. Are you hurt?” Limping, holding my side, I rounded the rubble and saw them in the scan, their bodies bright in the night, smoldering energies that had texture and smell. Joy danced at the edges of the scan, a synesthesia similar to mage-heat that I hadn’t noticed before.
Eli and Lucas stood near Thadd, who held one wing close to his body, the other half-furled. The two Waldroup brothers, Jasper, Rupert, and Audric were in a loose circle, weapons drawn. Five of my six champards, three elders of the kirk. They all looked worn to the bone, faces smeared with grime, body odors rank. They were beat. I could smell exhaustion on them, and old blood, and the reek of death.
I stopped as another spear of agony stabbed me. I touched my side where the spur had pierced. The worst of the broken ribs were just above it, and the pain of the two wounds seemed to mingle and consolidate, becoming more than the sum of the two. I was really hurt.
“Thorn? What’s wrong?” There was worry in Eli’s voice, and it warmed me.
I pulled off a healing amulet and two pain-relieving ones, thumbing them on and sliding them into a dobok pocket over the wounds. “Broken ribs.”
“How bad—”
“Later,” I interrupted. “Did you smell a reek when you landed? Something awful?” Eli nodded. “That smell is succubus larvae, and the queen is here.”
I saw their auras spark with sharp colors, and heard the steel-on-steel scritch of more blades being drawn. Afraid they would kill one another by accident, I pulled three illumination amulets, thumbed them on, and tossed them in a circle around the men. I should have done it sooner, but I was wasn’t thinking clearly. And the Flames had burned out my human vision, which was only now returning. The level of pain in my chest subsided marginally as the amulets went to work, and I managed a single breath. I handed another healing amulet to Thadd, who held it against his wing as Audric fashioned a crude splint.
“That’s what those things are on the walls,” I continued. “There are overlapping conjures here. I have no idea how many or what kind. But as long as the smell is contained, and no seraphs land, we should be okay.” A tickle started in the back of my throat, a dangerous cough that would hurt. I breathed shallowly, hoping to stifle it. “How long was I gone?” I asked.
“Too damn long,” Eli said, touching my shoulder as if to reassure himself I was alive.
“Forty-eight hours,” Audric said over his shoulder, reporting as he bound Thadd’s wing. “The seraphs watched as the town was attacked. We defended ourselves, but we lost many. The Special Forces were decimated in the first twelve hours, as if the spawn knew the greatest threat and targeted them specially. But the children and elderly are still safe behind your shield.”
Lucas stepped close, smelling of blood, crusted and old, but his sweat was sweet with the scent of manna. He reached out and touched my face, stroking my scars, wordless. I felt his relief. He had thought I was dead. I touched a crusted place on his hand. He shrugged my concern away.
Thadd sat down on a pile of rubble, rocking, holding his wing. One hand turned the seraph ring he wore on a chain around his neck. His plumage was caked with dried blood. It wasn’t his. A human had died in his arms.
To the side, I saw a shift of movement in the scan. Cheran was glamoured and hiding. I was surprised, as he was supposed to be in jail. I didn’t believe in luck or coincidence anymore; ergo, several things: someone important wanted him free, his liberator didn’t have to be one of the guys on my side, and Cheran wanted to remain hidden. He didn’t know about the blended scan, didn’t know I could see him. I decided to keep his presence quiet, but the scan wasn’t helping my light-headedness, so I dropped the skim and felt marginally better.
The Flames again blinked into sight overhead and spiraled back down. They passed through the shield with spits of energy, to circle behind me, saving my vision but holding back. Which I didn’t like at all.
A light illuminated the old church and the Ravens touched down in a back-to-back triangle, swords drawn. Their mouths opened and it was clear they were shouting, though there was no sound. And they didn’t see us. Interesting.
“Speak of the devil,” Eli muttered, hate in his tone.
Up close, I could tell these were crack troops, holy beings who lived to fight. They furled their wings tight, as if they intended to stay. The Ravens searched the night with glowing eyes.
Seraphs with swords. A succubus queen. Larvae. Not good at all. We were one heartbeat from judgment and death, a second heartbeat away from forcing the seraphs into heat. I had seen that happen when a seraph came upon a succubus. It hadn’t been pretty.
I shouted to the Ravens. They didn’t look my way. I stepped toward them and smacked into the shield, a barrier that brought me up short, a hot electric charge sizzling up my arm. This shield was a lot stronger than the one the queen was behind.
Azazel was luring seraphs here. The wheels had brought my champards—Amethyst in a rage, helping the Dragon, or the wheels bringing me assistance? And it sent them through the shield. I had a feeling that was unusual, even for a wheel. Whatever forces were working, it was Rupert’s dream. I needed my longsword, its prime amulet, and the femur bone.
Overhead, I caught sight of three more seraphs spiraling down, Zadkiel, Raziel, and Cheriour. But the wheels were nowhere in sight. Glamoured? Gone?
My threatening cough was growing more insistent, my breath harder to catch. I feared I had punctured a lung and it was filling with blood. But I had a battle to fight. I could die later.
To the Flames, I composed a formal request, saying, “Omega mage, I have been called. Omega mage, so be it. Yet, I ask, not demand. I beg, not command. Will you help this battle?”
“Yourssss to command,” they said, the words like the explosion of gases, the hum of electricity, and the ringing of heavy brass.
“The queen is protected by a conjure. Kill it,” I said. “Protect the other mage.”
“We cannot break the ssshhhield,” one said.
Despair filled me as they spun slowly away in a snaking line to hover over the queen’s shield. I followed them. The queen was crouched beside a pile of broken stones and brick on the cracked, burned floor. Rose was stretched out at her feet. I was in no condition to fight the succubus one-on-one. I wasn’t in condition to fight off a preschooler armed with a toy club. I reached out and touched the shield. It shocked me to my toes and I eased back.
On impulse, I stabbed into the shield with the Flame-blessed tanto. The blade slid in with a grinding sound like metal on stones. Deep purple-black embers sparkled around the insertion point. I shoved down on the blade, but it didn’t give. And now the tanto was stuck. Seraph stones. I couldn’t do anything right. I braced a foot on the shield, ignoring the electric shocks through my boot and the agony of my chest, and
pulled. Slowly, with a sound like rocks in a tumbler, the blade slid free, leaving a thin slice. The stink of succubus wafted out.
I considered the small hole, and touched a throwing knife blade to the tanto. The touch created a tiny spark, like a minuscule sun, startling me, bringing a smile to my face. With a flick of my wrist, I threw the knife at the queen. So fast I couldn’t follow, the knife pierced the shield with a spit of sound, fine cracks shattering through the protective conjure at the impact point, centered around an elongated hole, like glass hit by a bullet. “Yes,” I yelled, exultant.
Beyond, the blade quivered in the succubus’s lower abdomen. Its scream filtered through the two holes. Eli threw a fist in the air. “You did it!” Sometimes flying by the seat of my pants paid off.
The queen screeched, bouncing away from my twin, beating around the wound in pain. It was a horrid vision, the human-looking woman beating herself, a knife sticking from her. Black blood trickled out around the blade. I hardened myself to the image as a tiny blaze of hope ignited in my chest. If the Dragon stayed gone we might…
If. I knew better than to think Murphy’s Law would keep its ugly paws off. Yet, the Flames formed into two arrows. Both shot forward, through the small holes, hitting the succubus at the wound site and disappearing inside. Eli cheered again and the other champards gathered close, Lucas at my back. Within the shield, Rose looked around, as if trying to find the source of the screeching. Her head bobbed on her neck like a bloom on a broken stem, drunken, and she seemed to fall asleep before she ever found me beyond the shield. She lay on the floor of the church as Jane danced around her, kicking her once in her pain.
I had to figure out how to get me through the shield. I touched another blade to the tanto, this time prepared for the spark, squinting my eyes. I threw it. Off balance from the pain of my ribs, my aim not sure, it sliced through the protective barrier and sliced the queen beneath the arm, to skitter away.