Host

by Faith Hunter

  “Three and three and one, I greet thee,” I said with the formality of mage to the High Host. “If you will, three to demolish spawn, three to harass the beast, and one to me.”

  From down the street voices called out, “Fire brigade!”

  “Buckets!” A siren sounded, a long wail. “Get the truck!”

  Before my face, the Flames rose and twirled, leaving plasma trails in the night, blue-bright on my retinas. They divided and spun away in groups of three, one group to the rooftops where spawn chittered, another to attack the succubus, darting toward it in an arrow shape. One lone Flame hovered near me. It worked. They had done what I asked.

  Out of the shadows, Cheran hissed again, this time a single word. “Omega.” But that was for another time as well.

  Still looking to the side so my vision wouldn’t be affected, I asked the Flame, “Can you coat my blade with your power? Is it possible?”

  It dashed along the mage-steel of the longsword, touching it once. A shock zapped through the prime amulet hilt, stinging my palm, and the Flame swept away with a tremor, as if pained. “I guess not,” I said, shaking my hand. My gaze raked the street.

  The succubus shrieked as an arrow of Flames stabbed beneath its arm, pierced its side, and disappeared within. The reek of the blood of Darkness, rancid and sulfurous, was joined by the scent of scorched, rotting meat, and the cleaner smell of burning wood. Screams echoed up and down the street and up into the hills.

  Audric and Rupert danced into the illumination and back into the night, part of the struggle, swords flashing in savage-blade.

  Fire brightened the night, sputtering yellow, throwing smoke from the housetops in choking clouds. In the fitful light, two humans, Gloria and her husband, aimed carefully, their weapons set for single-shot. They rang out, the smell of cordite adding to the stench. Eli moved almost as gracefully as a supernat, darting in to recut the tendons on the beast’s ankles. I smelled Thadd in the night, far off, not coming close. It wasn’t fear of the beast, I knew, but he had to have heard about the new mage in town, and was protecting himself.

  I extended the tanto to the Flame. “How about this one?” This blade was also mage-made steel, but not the highest quality, not made especially for me, and not attached to a prime amulet like the hilt of the longsword. Gingerly, it touched the edge, singing a single note, like a silver bell pealing. There was no shock. The Flame elongated, drawing itself into a narrow beam of light, and settled onto the edge of the blade.

  “Holy light sabers, Batman,” Eli said from my side. “It’s Luke Skywalker.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I knew it was irreverent. Eli always was. I also knew that to use the weapon I had just been given, I’d have to get close to the succubus. Real close. Mage-in-dire close. How dumb was that? I handed my longsword to Eli.

  “I take it you’re going to do something stupid,” he said.

  With a daunting sense of déjà vu, I asked, “Can you get me next to it?”

  Most men, even my champards, would have tried to stop me. Eli just blew out a breath and said, “I may not be able to kill it, but I can give it a hurtin’.”

  I liked him a lot in that moment. He stuck my sword in his belt and brandished the flamethrower, checking the fluid levels in the bulbous bag. “Don’t get yourself killed,” he said as he worked. “We have unfinished business.” When I looked the question at him, he said, “A saddle, whipped cream, maybe a pair of handcuffs? And silk. Yeah.” He twirled a handgun like a western gunslinger and pumped the bag of the flamethrower. “Red silk. A teddy.”

  I laughed, the sound a surprised huff of breath.

  “Follow me,” he said, winking an amber eye. He adjusted a black wire that arched from his mouth to his ear, a high-tech radio. “Alpha to my four o’clock,” Eli said into the mike, a command. “Beta to twelve,” he shouted. “On my mark!” And he rushed forward, racing to the feet of the succubus.

  Chapter 4

  Eli aimed the barrel of the flamethrower up at the queen’s face and pulled the trigger. A ten-foot-long burst of fire shot into the night and hit the beast’s face, scenting the air with hyssop, rosemary, and scorched meat. The queen’s high-pitched squeal echoed between the buildings. The fire went out and Eli ducked under an ungainly swipe. He had blinded the succubus. It dropped Cissy. Jacey screamed. I saw the girl tumble to our left. Dead, surely dead. I heard a thump and grunt.

  “Got her,” Rupert shouted. Relief swept through me.

  “Inside!” Audric said to his partner. “Set the ward.”

  I had a quick impression of Rupert, still half-naked, carrying the child, running through the frozen street, Jacey at his heels. Humans attacked, slashing at the beast, leaping back.

  Three Flames arrowed in, hitting soft tissue in the queen’s underarms, its groin, its ripped belly, retreating, hitting again like pulsars. Each site flamed blue before darkening with a puff of acrid smoke. Well-fed Darkness healed fast, but these wounds gaped and seeped. As I watched, the Flames darted into an open wound and disappeared inside, burned, sliced, and reappeared as the Darkness wailed and raged and beat its own body, trying to rid itself of the pain.

  Shots rang in the night. Blood splattered. Humans shouted. It looked like we were winning, yet, as I watched, one eye formed into an orb and the beast’s face healed. To compensate, the Flames grew in size, from basketball-sized to globe-sized, three feet across and too bright to look at, dazzling as small suns. The entire street was lit by their glory.

  In mage-sight, the beast’s energies reached nearly twice my height, its physical form bulked with prehistoric musculature. If it struck me, it would shatter my mage-brittle bones. If it scored a direct hit, it would kill me. I was still going in. How stupid was that? I carefully placed my feet in the proper positions, unable to feel the uneven ground beneath me. Nausea from the stress of battle gripped me; I shuddered with cold, waiting for Eli’s order.

  A second arc of fire shot through the night, hitting its face. “Now!” Eli shouted. “Now!”

  I attacked the Darkness. Mage-fast, trusting my balance on unsteady, numb feet, I dashed in, cutting, cutting, thrusting into the succubus’ belly with the blue-glowing tanto. I flew from the sleeping cat to the dolphin, through all three forms of the crab, abridged versions used by a mage with only one blade.

  With each strike, the tanto sang against my palm, long bell-like tones of pleasure and fury. The smell of holiness, if there was one, had to be the scent of the burning blade. Roses, lilies, herbs, and wildflowers. The scent of sunlight and the ozone of lightning. The dust of fresh-mined stone. Guns boomed, aiming higher at the queen, hitting its shoulders and chest. The succubus shrieked, an earsplitting howl.

  Screams went up around me—terror and pain. I whirled away from the beast. Devil-spawn swarmed in. I executed the whirlwind, a slashing figure eight, a wild move, suitable for dispatching numbers of the small reddish creatures at once. Black blood flew, a wide spray of acidic droplets that burned through my pajamas like fire on my flesh.

  Instead of driving the spawn back, instead of granting a respite, my move triggered an unexpected response: the usually mindless creatures regrouped and darted in, their symmetry and organization distinctly unspawnlike. One took a bite out of my calf, ripping my pajamas, bloody gouges from razor-sharp teeth and three-fingered, clawed hands. I felt a conjure sizzle over my skin and the spawn dropped away, lifeless on the snow. Cheran, I knew. I was losing blood but at least I was no longer cold or paralyzed with uncertainty. I dashed in, striking, wishing I was stronger, taller, a lot taller.

  The queen was thrashing, roaring, head back, a man held in its left fist, his limbs whipping bonelessly. Its right hand made a sweeping motion, as if drawing in threads of yarn. The spawn followed in its wake, attacking a grouping of humans at its feet.

  “It’s directing spawn,” Eli said of the queen. He pulled me beneath the porch of Rupert’s loft for a moment, our backs to a brick wall. Breath heaving, I lowe
red the tanto with its blue-light blade. My muscles protested the sudden stillness, my back tight, threatening to spasm. My left side ached, the old injury that had never quite healed. My feet were numb. I ignored them all.

  The queen gestured. Too far away to help, we watched as a group of spawn attacked with military precision, taking down three humans who were erecting a barricade. The attack was quick and brutal, and they began to feed on flesh while it still quivered with life. The beast devoured the man it had been holding, energy for healing. “It’s in charge,” Eli said, knocking over a stack of firewood, creating a makeshift fence between us and the fight in the street.

  “Looks like,” Audric replied, ducking into our temporary haven. He was slicked with sweat, which was freezing in the cold wind, a white, rimming crust on his dark skin, which glowed with the mage energies of his half-breed heritage. He was smeared with black and red blood. His skin was scorched and blistered from the acid, but he seemed not to notice. “Shield,” he instructed me. With a single thought I activated a shield I had devised. It allowed in beings of Light, people I liked, and necessities like air, but kept out bad guys and bullets. Or had, once.

  “What do they want?” I asked, winded. “Besides Stanhope blood?”

  “That’s not enough?” Eli asked, breathing harder. He handed me my longsword and bent over, trying to catch his breath.

  “Their strategy is structured, which is unheard of,” Audric said, sinking into teacher mode, the tone he used when training me in savage-chi. “Watch them. With this kind of organization, they could have taken a Stanhope with no fight at all.”

  “They couldn’t find them,” I said. “Rupert and Ciana were behind the ward until I turned it off, and Lucas ate something when he was a prisoner on the Trine. I think it changed the way he smells.” And Thadd smells like kylen, but I didn’t say that and no one asked.

  “It could have taken a Stanhope since. So what else do they want?” Audric asked.

  “Chaos and—” Eli cut himself off as a new thought formed. He stood and leaned over the pile of wood, so close to the shield he was nearly touching it, watching the bedlam as a score of humans circled the succubus, firing shotguns up at it, the sound of four-aught buck incredible. Bodies littered the snow. “This is the third time they’ve attacked the town itself,” he mused, his voice growing steady, his breath evening out. “Each attack has utilized different methodology, tactics, and combatants. And this time they’re firing the roofs, so this time, maybe they came prepared to finish us off, to take out the town after they get their blood donor. A two-fer.”

  “More aims than those, perhaps,” Audric said.

  “Collect Stanhope blood, wipe out the town or damage it substantially, kill or capture our mage,” Eli said, twisting his back and delts in a series of stretches. “And it could have sensed the presence of a second mage.”

  Audric nodded and finished the thought. “And felt the time was propitious for taking both.” Propitious. I wanted to laugh, but didn’t have the energy. Only a second unforeseen, a half-breed, a master of savage-chi, would use a ten-dollar word during a prolonged battle.

  “Or maybe it’s been training troops just for tonight,” Eli said, repositioning his weapons and the night-vision goggles hanging on his chest. “Maybe the previous assaults were sorties to train and get the layout of the place.” Audric lit up as the thought found a home in his mind. The men shared one of those chest-beating manly looks that always excluded women. Ugh. Big trouble. Protect the women and children. Blood, guts, and glory. Ugh.

  I was too drained to comment. All I wanted to do was fall to the snow and sleep. Unlike Eli, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

  “Time for the big guns,” Eli said. This time when he spoke into the ear wire, it was sotto voce, but mages have a broad audible range, and I heard what he said. “Deploy the W-T-seven, asap.” He looked at Audric, a wide grin splitting his face. “A big-ass gun. Big enough to take out Godzilla.”

  I hoped the W-T-seven was all he claimed, as the succubus had drawn in a thunderhead of energy. In mage-sight its aura was flashing with black lightning, a big, ugly monster. Like the ugly paintings in ancient Pre-Ap cathedrals and museums.

  Rupert, dressed now in flannel, jeans, and a jacket and carrying an armful of clothing and weapons, dashed from the doorway. To avoid an energy backlash, I flicked the shield off as he entered the shelter. He tossed me the green marble sphere that set the ward over the shop and loft. I fumbled the catch, which thankfully no one saw or I’d have been the victim of ribbing. Mages were supposed to be so much faster than humans. Gesturing the men away from the wall at our backs, I thumbed on the ward, protecting Ciana, Cissy, and Jacey. A weight seemed to lift off me. Careful to keep the differing energy patterns separate, I opened the shield again.

  “Cissy’s alive,” he said when I focused on him. I closed my eyes in gratitude. Maybe it was true that God the Victorious didn’t listen to mages, but he had heard somebody’s prayer. “Put these on.” Rupert dropped my battle boots in the snow and draped my battle cloak around my shoulders. The warmth trapped in the lining was like a furnace to my skin. I realized how cold I was. I had gotten dangerously hypothermic. Stupid, stupid, stupid. My champard had noted my condition and acted to correct it, but that didn’t negate my stupidity.

  I smiled my thanks at him as I thumbed on an amulet for heating water and dropped it at my feet. Immediately the snow and ice melted, the puddle warming to steam. My feet felt like they were in boiling water, but the conjure was for bathwater, a maximum of one hundred four degrees. The water tinged red as blood softened and melted. Muscles and tendons ached, and my soles felt as if I had sliced them with knives and walked through salt.

  I dropped in a healing amulet and dipped my hands in, sliding the ripped socks off and tossing them away as I massaged my toes and scrubbed my feet. Snowmelt wasn’t beneficial water for stone mages, but any port in a storm. My ring-shaped prime amulet and the hilt-prime flared brighter, offering me protection from the snowmelt, the loss of power that came from contact with unpurified water, as they had from frostbite. Blood flowed freely, but I could deal with that later. My neomage attributes brightened, my skin closer to its normal pearly hue, and I realized how stupid—and lucky—I had been. On my necklace, various amulets were emitting a sort of hum as they responded to the state of my stressed body.

  In the street, two snow-el-mobiles whizzed up, slinging snow and ice from the runners. Half a dozen ragged men jumped from them and spread into formation, joining the attackers from the front and sides. I looked away long enough to pull the boots on over my wet and bleeding feet. When I looked back up, a third snow-el-mobile scattered the combatants and hissed to a halt. Mounted on the back was a four-foot-long black metal pipe attached to a black box about eighteen inches on a side. A magazine coiled from a spindle on one side. The WT7. Eli was right. It was a big-ass gun.

  “Sixty-six caliber, loaded with shells designed to explode a millisecond after contact, composed of standard ammo and salt mined from the shores of the Dead Sea,” Eli said. “Mixed with a few atoms of seraph-steel.”

  I looked up from securing my cloak. Audric stared at him as well. “Seraph-steel?” he asked. “Where did the EIH obtain seraph-steel?”

  “Some unallied Watchers are a little less fastidious than the High Host would like.” Into the mike he said, “Fire at will.”

  The Earth Invasion Heretics believed that seraphs and Darkness alike were invaders from another planet, here to continue a conflict that destroyed their home world and to claim Earth for their own. It was a conspiracy theory of the lowest order. I thought it was a bunch of hooey, but I was willing to be proved wrong. There was a lot I didn’t know about the High Host.

  The kirk actively sought out EIH operatives for punishment, which varied from branding to death—very messy death, with lots of blood and gore. The operatives fighting the succubus didn’t seem very concerned with that at the moment, however. All were men, all dressed
in layers of rags, from their ratty knit caps to the strips of old car tires bound to their feet in lieu of boots. Their pants were tattered, coats were full of holes, but their pockets were bulging and each carried assault rifles, holstered handguns, and myriad knives. One had an ax strapped to his back. What they did without in terms of personal comfort, they made up for in weaponry. It was impressive. And I had seen them fight. They seemed to know little in the way of fear.

  These were stone-hard mountain men, bred to war from generations of hardscrabble survivalists. There was no way they had gotten here this fast from their homes high in the surrounding hills. They had been nearby. Waiting. Another question to ask later, when there was time. If there was time.

  The gunner leaped to the back of the el-mobile and cradled his weapon like a lover. The big gun boomed. In the back-flash of fire, I caught sight of an amulet on his chest, a ring of shells sewn onto his coat, a mage-made talisman. On the snow-el-mobile was another, this one made of fish bones shaped in a rune of protection. Spawn balls. The EIH are working with a sea mage.

  “Ready?” Eli asked. The men with me nodded, checking their weapons. “Let’s boogie.”

  I flicked off the shield as swarms of spawn scampered down the sides of buildings and out of alleys, pursued by Flames with a diameter of three feet. They chased the spawn straight at a massive vehicle racing down the street with a horrid roar, spitting smoke. It was the town’s old fire truck, usually stored in an old barn on Lower Street, and powered by rare and expensive gasoline. The truck barreled into the swarms, scattering the midsized reddish creatures as if the Flames had planned the move. The men with me shouted war cries and raced into the night behind the truck, joining the fight, leaving me alone as the vehicle careened around a corner.