Crack the Sky: Preternatural Chronicles Book 8 (The Preternatural Chronicles)

by Hunter Blain

  From where his head was turned sideways to allow a better hold on the cervical spine, Depweg could see an obsidian portal open up directly in front of the demon wolf.

  An enormous hand disappeared inside right as something raised the hairs on the back of Depweg’s neck.

  All too late, Depweg realized what was happening and tried to drop to the ground right as the demon’s hand reached through another portal directly behind the pair and wrapped powerful fingers around Depweg’s torso.

  The werewolf yelped in surprise and pain as he was yanked through the portal, only to be faced with the demon wolf who was nearly the size of a house.

  Struggling, Depweg could do nothing but growl, bark, and show chomping fangs as he was effortlessly lifted up to the demon’s face.

  “Diiiiiiiiiieee,” the demon rumbled with a guttural voice that barely registered as words.

  Depweg’s head and shoulders were the only things poking out of the demon’s hand as he was brought up to horrific, drool-laced teeth.

  A maw big enough to eat an entire SUV opened wide as Depweg’s head was inserted past glistening lips.

  “No!” was all Depweg could say as teeth mashed down with an earsplitting crack as fangs pierced flesh and crushed bone.

  35

  John

  Lolth’s hands greeted the sky as she stood with arms fully extended above her head, her malicious smile never fading.

  Something caught my eye, and I dared a glance toward the mailbox nearby.

  With breaths that were becoming increasingly heavy with each passing moment, I took a step back as I saw the shadow of the mailbox quiver before slithering into a ball on the ground.

  Trees began to applaud again as branches were rustled, and I looked around with wide eyes to see that Depweg lived on some acreage with lots of trees dotting the landscape.

  As with the mailbox, shadows gyrated before collapsing into a dense, singular ball.

  Just over the rustling of countless leaves, my own quick, wheezing breaths filled my ears while I stumbled in circles. My gaze took in easily hundreds of shadow balls that were beginning to move like a gestating baby inside the womb.

  “Come out, children. It’s time to play,” Lolth said in a voice that would have turned molten lava into ice.

  The mailbox shadow ball split into a sinewy lizard-type thing with long legs, a whipping tail, and freaking bat wings.

  My right hand demanded that I drop the silver knife and manifest my gladius, but my brain belayed that order by reminding my limb that the gladius did as much damage with a direct strike to Lolth as swiping a brick wall with a feather duster.

  “Stupid angel fail-safes!” I bitched under my breath right as I turned my attention to one of the larger spheres that was giving birth to an almost identical demon bat…thing…only much, much bigger.

  To make matters worse, I could hear Depweg crying out, “No!” somewhere in the distance. His tone was one I wasn’t used to hearing from my best friend: helpless terror.

  “Depweg…” I hissed with a quivering brow that all of a sudden went still.

  Clutching the silver knife, I blurred to the small bat demon and cut it in half with a satisfying shriek of agony from the little bastard.

  To my relief, it puffed into smoke right as several hundred larger bat demons took flight with a frenzy of flapping wings.

  With a trepid tilt of my head, I watched as shadows blotted out the faint light of the moon like a storm marching in in the dead of night.

  Snapping my gaze to the grinning Lolth, I turned my body and blocked her view of the knife in my right hand.

  “What do you want,” I asked in a flat statement rather than a question, buying time to formulate my plan.

  “What I’ve always wanted, vampire. Darkness.”

  As the goddess of the Shadow Court spoke, I manifested an ivory link of chains etched in gold markings and attached them to the hilt of the silver knife. Calculating the distance between Lolth and me, I allowed for just over thirty feet of length.

  “Allow me to help you see the dark!” I cried out as I lunged, flinging my right arm forward and sending the point of the silver blade toward her remaining eye. Realizing this was my perfect opportunity for a Mortal Kombat reference, I quickly yelled, “Get over here!” in my best Scorpion impression.

  Lolth saw the attack coming and batted the knife to the side as a confident grin dropped into a frown of annoyance.

  As the silver blade was flung to the side, I yanked on the attached ivory chain and spun it in a full circle fast enough to break the sound barrier with a sonic boom right by her featureless face.

  The shock wave caught Lolth off guard, making her slam her eye shut and flinch in reflex. This allowed my knife to cut a deep line from cheek to cheek and produce a satisfying shriek from the lumbering shadow monster.

  The force of impact slowed my blade, and I had to spin it around my head again to regain momentum.

  Recovering quickly, Lolth charged forward with a battle cry reminiscent of a sci-fi horror movie monster. In response to her signal, the entire cloud of swarming bat monsters dove all at once in my direction.

  “Come on then!” I shouted as I swung the chain around, aiming to cut the Shadow goddess in half and take her out of the fight for at least a minute or so.

  The blade broke the sound barrier again, but Lolth was expecting it this time, and reacted by splitting in half.

  There was a brief moment of WTF that went on in my head as I saw her body intentionally pull apart before the blade passed harmlessly through the empty air.

  To make matters worse, the two chunks of Lolth morphed in midair. The arms of her upper torso flattened into powerful wings while her legs multiplied and thinned until a spider the size of a freaking car was skittering toward me.

  “Ah shit!” I yelped in a pitch that suggested my testicles had never dropped, and stumbled backward right as my own chain—which had been traveling faster than the speed of sound—began wrapping around my head.

  My mind instantly processed the idea of dropping the chain manifestation, but understood I also risked losing the blade, as it would surely be flung somewhere far out of reach.

  On instinct, I reached upward with my left hand and immediately felt the chain hit my forearm and begin wrapping around it as I ducked my head lower.

  Lolth flapped with enough force to flatten grass as the spider thumped into the ground, piercing the front yard effortlessly.

  Hundreds of huge bat wings rang out like machine gun fire as the wave of monsters approached, ready to tear me to shreds.

  Time froze as a notion flared inside my head in a fraction of a second, like having an entire dialogue between opposing debaters and arriving at a conclusion instantly. The topic: remove my armor and become a part of this time line or risk even the smallest of enemies having the power to obliterate me like the dog had done to my shin.

  Pros:

  I won’t mimic a fat butterfly smashing into a speeding car’s windshield when the wave of shadows hit me.

  I’ll be able to attack them with all of my abilities, especially my flaming gladius and elementally focused hammer.

  Cons:

  I’m not entirely sure how the Time Sphere works and might erase the connection to my time line. This would lead to a more than likely scenario of this stream of time crashing into the real river of time and destroying everything.

  I don’t know how long it would take to reorient to this time line anyway, and might get attacked without the protection of my armor. And I still very much remember how absolutely deadly Lolth was to me when I was just a vampire.

  Without the armor, even one tiny scratch from any of the hundreds of charging enemies could spread the darkness throughout my body.

  The featureless, giant spider readied fangs that gleamed in the darkness as Lolth’s upper half opened a maw full of jagged shark’s teeth.

  A storm of shadow bats were mere yards above as they attacked from multiple do
wnward angles, all pointed at different parts of my helpless body.

  Snapping back to the now, I made my decision, and prayed it was the right one.

  36

  Depweg

  Still in the demon wolf’s giant hand, Depweg watched as the horrendous teeth sped to impale his flesh.

  With sheer focus of will, the twelve-foot-tall feral wolf sucked in a breath and reverted to considerably less than half his size, slipping through the monster’s grip before it even knew what was going on.

  Fangs pierced the flesh of the giant, lumbering hand that fed the monster as Depweg dropped to the ground in his man-suit and rolled away.

  The demon wolf roared in fury and pain as it pulled a maw dripping with crimson away from a hand with a thumb and first two fingers mangled nearly beyond recognition.

  Depweg smiled at seeing the damage before a wave of nausea overtook him and his stomach violently expelled what little contents it had.

  Sweat beaded on Depweg’s entire body as bones, joints, muscles, and organs all protested the speed at which he had shifted back to his man-suit.

  Something that sounded like snapping tree limbs made an excruciatingly debilitated Depweg look up and see the demon’s hand mending at unfair speeds.

  Glowing yellow-and-red eyes locked onto Depweg as the demonic wolf pulled its lips back in a snarl. Hot breath steamed in the air as drool laced with scarlet roped down a fur-covered chin.

  With blinding speed, the monster rushed forward, his massive, clawed hands outstretched.

  A renewed surge of adrenaline spewed into Depweg’s veins, and he leaped into the air as a man as the demon passed just underneath. A twelve-foot-tall feral werewolf landed and turned right as the last of the demon disappeared into a portal.

  Knowing what was coming next, Depweg once again jumped, but tucked his arms in while crossing his legs and spinning like the world’s hairiest gymnast.

  Huge hands swiped through the air hard enough to send torrents of air crashing through the woods, bending saplings and ripping up tall grass, but missed the agile Depweg.

  Landing in a crouch as close to the ground as he could manage, Depweg shot forward on all fours and passed through the demon’s powerful legs.

  As he moved, Depweg lashed out with fierce claw swipes, aiming for the tendons on the back of the monster’s legs.

  Rent flesh spewed hot blood as Depweg rolled to a stop, turning to orient himself back on his target, which had begun to wobble where it tried to stand.

  Taking advantage of the brief moment before the wounds would heal, Depweg leaped once again on the monster’s back and began fervently tearing huge chunks of meat out. But this time, he was focused on the flesh around the neck.

  Within a few seconds, an artery was split, and Depweg swallowed the gore whole. He needed the energy after the multiple—and instantaneous—transformations. A bonus was that it served to harm his powerful opponent and hopefully sap strength in order to heal the wounds.

  Intent on his target and how close he was to reaching the esophagus, Depweg didn’t see the Goliath’s hand reaching behind its head.

  All too late, Depweg realized what was happening and tried to drop to the ground, only to once again be wrapped in a grip that furiously tightened.

  All the long bones of Depweg’s arms and legs were shattered as his spine crumbled at his waist. He couldn’t even scream as his ribcage was crushed and lungs were punctured.

  There was a sensation of bouncing as the sound of an impact was muffled in Depweg’s ears…then everything went black.

  37

  John

  The shadow army swarmed me from almost all angles as I let the chain finish wrapping around my left arm. Once the silver knife was in my hand, I let the chain manifestation vanish and pulled myself into the fourth dimension.

  My armor warned me that we were using its batteries faster than a supersonic jet would use the amount of fuel that could fit into a Smart car.

  Ignoring the warning, I began slashing at the bat monsters with my left hand as accurately as an experienced butcher. It helped that everything was frozen in time around me.

  In my right hand I was willing a ball of light, trying to not accidently create the bomb that Locke had warned me about. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to es’plode everything in a five-mile area just to be sure Lolth was dead. Oh no, quite the contrary. If it weren’t for Depweg, I would have enjoyed properly killing Lolth this time with a big bada boom. But I couldn’t risk how much energy it would consume, or, ya know, killing Depweg.

  With several of the monsters disassembled in my direct vicinity, I arced the ball of light through the air, making sure to aim for both halves of Lolth and the encroaching flying shadows.

  A warning light flashed in the control room of my mind, informing me that my celestial batteries were already half empty, with the gauge sprinting toward E.

  Lilith, I was glad I had filled up my tanks after using all that energy to fly through outer space and each time I had dropped out of the In-Between to check for Depweg. How does the saying go? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Something like that.

  Dropping out of the higher dimension, I dove backward as a blinding burst of light shone like a miniature sun for a nanosecond.

  Lolth screamed before both pieces tumbled to the ground, the top and bottom half reforming like a liquidy gelatin. White smoke wafted from seared flesh, and all of a sudden, I could see a lot of the features the darkness had hidden.

  Above, the army of bat…lizard…things…let out a chorus of shrieks before exploding into black smoke and evaporating into nothing.

  Scrambling to my feet, I rushed to where Lolth was reforming into her Goliath form and began slashing with the silver knife.

  We both screamed, but for completely different reasons.

  I could feel the smile on my face as my hand blurred in front of me, carving out sections of the shadow monster like a chain saw cutting into a down pillow.

  As the grass became visible through the Shadow goddess’s back, something lashed out at me, striking me in my sternum and sending me flying as if launched from a trebuchet.

  My armor protected me from some of the direct impact, but I still had my neck, arms, and legs broken from the force of the strike. It was then that my brain reminded me that I was in her domain of time.

  An emergency signal rushed through my extremely damaged nerves to my left hand, sending an order to hold as tight as possible for fear of losing the only weapon I could use.

  The ground of Depweg’s backyard was kind enough to catch me as I felt the bones in my neck grind together as I tumbled. It was at that moment I realized I couldn’t feel anything below my damn neck.

  Reinforcing the order through damaged pathways, I focused on healing only the connection needed to keep my grip around the hilt of the silver blade.

  Coming to a stop somewhere near the invisible line between yard and woods, I was met with a face full of dirt and annoying blades of grass touching one of my eyeballs.

  Blinking rapidly, I yanked my head back in reflex, only to be reminded of how my cervical spine now resembled fresh parmesan cheese from Olive Garden.

  “That’s enough, thank you,” I drunkenly mumbled to the waiter I was hallucinating, signaling that he could stop grinding the fresh block of cheese for my salad.

  Tremors of impact made my head painfully bounce as my bones attempted to heal. Thank Lilith I hadn’t used any more energy by being in the fourth dimension; otherwise, I’d be as helpless as a cow at the slaughterhouse.

  The tremors grew closer, and my neck healed enough for me to turn my head and see something that would give me daymares.

  It was the demon I had seen in my dreams and that had also stomped through downtown Houston before deciding to make me his personal chew toy. He was as huge as a freaking house, with knuckles that dragged the ground.

  There was one glaring difference, however. He was completely covered in dark fur and had the
nightmarish face of a werewolf—except for the eyes, which glowed with crimson irises.

  To add insult to injury, someone peed my pants at that moment.

  The demon extended a hand in my direction, and he opened it to reveal a crumpled lump of meat that was covered in matted fur. In the moonlight, I didn’t recognize what it was holding until my mind pieced together what it had to be.

  “But Depweg’s fur is brown…” I wheezed while my shoulders and elbows finished healing, allowing me to shakily prop myself up and get a better look.

  Water that seemed to be a purplish black dripped from the monster’s hand, and then it hit me. For centuries, I had seen blood mimic the color of night when illuminated by moonlight.

  “DEPWEG, NO!” I shouted, forcefully willing the rest of my body to heal.

  A portion of my brain sent an alarm that my left hand was clutching dirt, and not the knife.

  Manifesting wings, I pushed off the ground with my hands and began flapping while dislocated legs hung loosely from my waist, not yet healed.

  “I’LL KILL YOU!” I screamed as my eyes grew hot and began to plume with heavenflame.

  Something glinted in the light of the moon from the corner of my vision, and I knew what it was without taking my eyes off the unholy mutation that was presenting the crushed corpse of my friend like a present.

  My hips, knees, and ankles popped as I finished healing.

  On rage-fueled instinct, my gladius grew to life in my hand, heavenflames eagerly licking toward the sky.

  A hoarse chuckle sang out as a once featureless black cat hopped onto the demon’s left shoulder, its flesh still visible from the burns I had inflicted. Only one amethyst eye remained.

  “Your weapon has no effect here, vampire,” Lolth stated coldly, the Cheshire grin on her face stretching from ear to ear. “You are beaten.”