by Faith Hunter
I had no incantation for clean air. I had no way to help Rupert. He was breathing, however, and that meant he was alive. Audric’s half-mage genetic structure would provide him some protection from the gaseous Dark. I didn’t know about Thadd. Whatever the cloud was, it seemed to have been designed to affect only humans. Cheran and I were still upright.
A voice whispered, and I turned, searching for its source. “Little mage. I have tasted of you.” My heart rate sped up, an uneven riff of fear as I pivoted, placing my feet to either side of my friend. Cheran stepped slowly away from me, body relaxed, throwing-blades held loosely.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
“No. Not a friend.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Eli said, his voice muffled behind the mask.
Tendrils of the cloud brushed my face, slid along my seared, scraped arm, as cold and wintery as the fingers of death. I searched the deeper night, blades curling up and around in the egret. I glanced up. The moon and the stars were gone.
“I have placed a drop of your blood between my lips,” the voice said. “I claim you. Come to me.”
“Moving in beside you, Thorn,” Eli said, “at your four o’clock. Try not to cut off my head.” I chuckled, and the tone was dead, as if all sound stopped inches from my mouth. “Lucas is at your eight,” he finished.
“Yeah. Okay,” I said. I stopped turning. I felt light-headed and the back of my throat was tickling, so there was some effect.
The cloud slid inside my battle cloak, and I felt it moving against my skin. My flesh quivered and I wanted to throw up as it brushed my belly. It felt like claws, a conjure to render me weaponless and filled with terror. The world wavered beneath me, and I thought again, earthquake, but this time it was only vertigo. Burning acid rose in the back of my throat.
“You are the Thorn,” it whispered. “I have waited long for you.”
“You can wait a lot longer,” Eli said to the night.
My cloak billowed out as if a strong wind swirled beneath it. The tanto in my hand blazed bright blue and sang a note of warning that hurt my ears.
“I desired a child of your body, through the Mole Man’s lineage.” Claws scraped down my sides, curious, possessive.
I swallowed the acid down, a convulsive spasm. “Fancy that,” I said, bravado the only weapon I had left. Weakness leached into my bones from the night air, freezing. The Dragon was close enough to draw on our energies. Death was coming to the town and I didn’t know how to stop it. I clamped my arms tight to my sides, my useless blades crossed at my waist.
The thing in the air chuckled, the sound of a lover, amused. “Come. I desire you.”
Muscles weak, I slid to my knees, straddling Rupert. His body was warm beneath me, my shins and knees cold on the ice. Up and down the street the elders who had prayed, shouting scripture in spiritual warfare, lay silent and still. I missed the continuous sound of their litany, a background to the warfare of steel and explosives.
“You will be mine. You carry my talisman,” it said, its voice a sibilant hiss.
Blue light blazed like a torch in the darkness, trilling a piercing cry. I saw my hand setting the tanto on the street. I placed the longsword beside it. My hand went into a pocket.
“What the flying f—heck is she doing?” Eli said, barely avoiding swearing in the presence of the Dark. I wanted to laugh. As if the cloud surrounding us needed any help at all. “What’s she holding?” he asked no one in particular.
It was a six-inch-long claw from the underside of a dragonet leg. A spur. A thorn. I stroked the talisman, feeling the power thrum within it. I had carried it with me, in the pocket of my cloak, since it pierced my side. “Forcas used it to try to claim me,” I said.
“Forcas was my errand boy,” the Darkness breathed, “delivering the thorn of binding.” The spur hummed in my hand. Not the empty vessel I had thought, the spur had been waiting for this moment, this Darkness. In mage-sight, it glowed like a black opal with fire at its heart.
In some small, rational part of my brain, I knew I had been stupid to keep it, a keepsake of victory disguising a defeat postponed. Stupid, stupid, stupid, my mental voice condemned. I watched as my hand lifted, arm straight, pointing the barbed, razor-sharp spur at my left side. My scars blazed with a strange smoky light. The unhealed psychic wound on my side knotted tightly, the sensation more pleasure than pain. Something long and sinuous twisted through me.
“Come. You are mine.”
I belong to someone? A gentle joy welled up in me, surging with the beat of my heart. I was no longer alone. I was so tired of being alone. So tired of fighting.
“Thorn?”
“Stop her!”
A hand grabbed my arm, ripped the spur from me, and threw it to the street. Another raised a battle-ax above the amulet. The steel blade smashed down, breaking the talisman, disrupting the conjure. A shaft of dark lightning shot into the sky. Audric fell away from the broken barb, grunting. Thunder echoed down the street. Pain wrenched through my scars and a single pulse of white light lit them, a terrible schema of old wounds and ancient pain. For an instant, my amulets shone bright as a Flame. In the retinal afterburn, the world was a negative reality, black snow and white sky.
“What was that thing?” Eli shouted through the muffling of the gas mask. Audric, lying on the snow, shook with a single epilepticlike tremor in the aftermath of the explosion.
I snatched up my blades and stood. The whir of wings sounded and I tried to dance over Rupert’s body, but stumbled, falling to the side. A blow sent me sprawling. A stinger whipped by my ear. A second dragonet hovered over Rupert, barbed legs to either side, long snarled fur dragging the street. The flying beast slashed a long gash down my friend’s back.
I leaped at the beast’s head, changing my grip on the tanto, bringing the weapon forward along the plane of my body. I drew on the prime amulet in the hilt of the longsword, pulled on the prime ring and visa, drawing all the power at my disposal into me. Strength poured in.
Midstrike, the visa suggested a verse from Job and I shouted, my voice swelling through the tourmaline into a mighty roar as I cut. “His hand hath pierced the swift serpent!” In a death strike, I thrust up under its jaw with the last word, snapping its mouth shut, driving the blade up through the roof of its mouth. The final thud against the top of its skull was a satisfying finish, forcing back its head, but again the tanto missed its tiny brain.
In a ferocious flex of muscle, it rose into the air over me, wrenching my left arm up as I gripped the tanto hilt. It carried my body high and again I shouted the scripture. Below me, a second dragonet darted in. I caught a glimpse of gray metal, a shaped ring, demon-iron forged over human steel. The claw holding it slid the steel along my body, into the bite wound on my calf. I screamed as the frozen metal seared down to the bone.
With a supple twist, the beast then dipped the iron against Rupert’s body, following the length of the bloody wound in his back. When it came away, Rupert’s blood splattered over my shins, hot and human, mixed with mage-blood. Comprehension blossomed, wordless.
The dragonet I had pinned thrashed in a vicious whip. The tanto blade slipped free of it. I hung suspended a moment, the blade plasma-bright. And then I fell to the ice. I gasped as air slammed out of my body. Breathless, lungs empty, I lay on the street, arms outspread, watching the night sky reappear overhead as the cloud of blackness coalesced into a spiral, forming a black tornado of might over the town. A true Darkness, the visa proposed. Leviathan.
Fear tightened my body and set off sparks in my vision. I understood why it had suggested Job in warfare. This was the vision of true Darkness Job had seen and prophesied. “Let that day be darkness; Let not God from above seek for it, Neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it…. Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.”
Leviathan.
This was the opponent we faced, an evil who had played two roles in the rebellion against the High Host: as
one who joined the Watchers, became their leader, and taught humans the arts of war before language had been recorded, and also as the left hand of Lucifer, taking part in that one’s rebellion against heaven. Since the time of the Last War, Leviathan had been coupled with the name Azazel. Azazel was the left hand of Satan.
This Dragon had been bound three times, twice in prehistory, and once by Mole Man’s sacrifice. The Dragon of Darkness was greater than we had guessed. I wondered if Mole Man had known the beast’s name.
The coil of air tightened, growing darker, shot through with motes of emptiness like holes in the universe, a Darkness so intense it trailed afterimages of lightless tails. The spiral of power centered on the demon-iron in the claw of the small dragonet. A link three inches across, smeared in Rupert’s blood. In my blood. “Oh, merciful seraphs,” I breathed. The Dragon, partially unbound from Mole Man’s chain, was manifesting.
The tornado of power slipped through the link like a finger gliding through a ring and carried it into the night air, swirling through it in a twisting, undulating snake of black cloud. Dragonets flew beside it, trumpeting in victory. The ground trembled as the earthquake shuddered through the ancient hills.
Audric and Eli were right. It was indeed much more than a two-fer. Layered intentions, incantations, and conjures, purposes that covered every possible contingency. The Dragon was using the death of the townsfolk, the mixed blood, its minions, and the link to break fully free. The Dark Wind whipped overhead, the spirit form of the Dragon.
Close by, the WT7 boomed. A dragonet split in two, spraying me with gore, its head tumbling into the night. The two-foot section between was vaporized. The big gun boomed again. Flames darted across my line of sight, zapping the dragonets. Where had they been, the Flames and the big weapon? Fighting what? I remembered to breathe, my ribs creaking with the motion. The cloud of Darkness hurt to inhale, bitter with the taste of failure.
Two more booms took out other dragonets and a chunk of a nearby building. A group of EIH soldiers hacked a beast into little pieces, too small to regenerate. Another creature was wounded when Gloria and her husband, legs wide and braced against the earth’s shaking, walked it down the street, pumping rounds into its underbelly.
I saw a flash of the beast’s face, and I could have sworn it was surprised. Bullets had never worked on Darkness. Until now. Humans had always been excellent at devising means of death, and they had finally discovered how to kill evil with Dead Sea salt ammo. Ironic that humans, who had been taught the arts of war by Azazel, were now able to destroy its followers.
Beneath me, the earth continued to roll and shift. Along the street, buildings buckled, walls giving way. Stones and chunks of brick fell. The cloud lifted, riding the night sky.
EIH warriors raced up and down the street in el-cars, weapons booming. Elders rose to their knees and resumed praying. Human soldiers stood, wobbly, and checked their weapons. The tornado continued to roar, pulling light and life through the link. I gripped my prime ring and mouthed the words to mage in dire, but the sound died unborn. It was too late. I was too late. I should have called long before now. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Once more I crawled to my feet. Audric struggled upright on the unstable earth, his face hard as polished marble. He strode to Rupert’s side, knelt, lifted him in a fireman’s hold, and carried his partner to partial protection beneath the porch of Thorn’s Gems. Its three-foot-thick walls still stood, though a crack ran along the mortar from a foundation stone to the roof.
Audric eased Rupert to the snow and sat beside him, holding the smaller man like a child. Windows and doors brightened. Snow on the street was a scorched white pelt running between the buildings. The Darkness was withdrawing. The remaining few dragonets flew away, north. The funnel cloud thrashed and tightened. In a flash, it dipped down and touched the succubus. The scaled body crumbled to dust, the particles sucked up by the roaring wind.
As if wrenched through a hole in the air, the tornado disappeared through the link. Black wind followed and vanished. Misty remnants dispersed. Silence was so loud my ears ached with the emptiness of it. Above me, the stars and moon shone white and pure onto the blood-splashed snow and ice. Wood smoke billowed in the wake of the Dark Wind. The dark tornado.
My parents had been killed by a tornado. A tornado was one of the Dragon’s forms. Two vital facts. Crucially significant. That meant its plans had been in place for decades. But I was so tired it was hard to think it through logically, point by point. All I could think was that Lolo, who had raised me when my parents died, had perhaps been behind the whole thing.
A voice whispered up from the depths of my mind: Or a dupe, led astray?
Weariness ached through my shoulders and hips, pain throbbing up from lacerated, frostbitten feet. My soles had bled in the boots and stuck. I tore ruined flesh with each step. My fingers had gripped the hilts so long, they creaked when I opened my hands. Bodies lay in pools of blood. The cries of the injured resounded weakly in the vacuum of silence left by the wind. So many dead and wounded. And all for nothing. I couldn’t help the single sob that welled up in me and echoed quietly down the street.
I wanted to believe that the retrieval of its succubus queen and the loss of so many dragonets was the reason the Dragon disappeared, but the Darkness said it wanted a child of mine through Mole Man’s line. Even though trapped in a different reality, had it been aware I was married to Lucas, a Stanhope, a grandchild several times down the line from Mole Man, Benaiah Stanhope?
There was too much I didn’t know, but I knew this—the reason for its departure. It had plenty of blood, mine and Rupert’s, mage and Stanhope. Mixed. And Rose? Did it have her?
It was all starting to make a terrible kind of sense. After Forcas and the dragon killed my parents, it had waited for my blood, unable to sense me for ten years. Then, in a moment of jealous anger, I had accidentally damaged my prime amulet and it found me. It had learned I was here, within the reach of its minions, placed here by Lolo, as part of her Machiavellian plan to free Barak, her lover, trapped on the Trine. Lolo, my Lolo, had been part of the Dragon’s plan. Knowingly or unknowingly. I shuddered.
I hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out, not good enough, fast enough, or strong enough. And because of that, the Dragon had what it needed to break the chain and finish what it had started so long ago. The destruction of humanity, of the seraphs, of the heavens and the earth. If ignorance was bliss, I’d never be blissful again. Tears trickled down my cheeks, the salt stinging in cuts and burns. This was my fault.
Chapter 6
This town will not allow the heresy of the Earth Invasion Heretics to be spoken. We will remain pure, true to the Most High and his High Host,” Elder Perkins shouted, his brown robe quivering along his body, both hands fisted.
“You don’t speak for all the citizens of Mineral City,” the small Cherokee woman said. “I say the EIH have every right to be heard. I’m the widow of Joseph Barefoot, who gave his life to save this misbegotten town.”
“So you say,” Perkins said. “We’ve seen no proof of his death.”
“She saw him die.” She pointed a finger at me. “Ask the town mage.” It seemed the entire crowd sighed. So did I.
It was morning, after a night spent gathering the bodies of the fallen Darkness and burning them. A night putting out fires that still smoked. A night healing the wounded and finding makeshift homes for the dispossessed. A night spent in grief and what-might-have-beens. And guilt. And anger.
Cheran, his fancy suit in tatters, fought fires, devising incantations and making conjures to melt snow and to snuff flame. I needed to learn those, but I wasn’t speaking to the flashy mage. He was working hard now, but he hadn’t fought when Darkness attacked. Instead, he had hidden under a glamour, throwing knives from a distance, helping only when it was prudent. He had accused Audric of cowardice, and then had behaved like a coward himself. He hadn’t acknowledged me once since the conflict. He avoided Audric like the plagues. H
is shame was a harsh burden.
It was an hour after dawn, and most of the townsfolk were gathered in the Central Baptist Church, the building used for town meetings, and the rare worship service when the crowd was too large for the newer kirk building or when the kirk was under repair. Everyone was exhausted, frightened, irritable, and looking for someone to blame. I had a feeling it would be me.
The meeting was being shown on SNN live, because the reporter/cameraman—woman, rather—had found a way to rig up something through one of the few satellite phones in town. The broadcast wouldn’t be delayed until the satellite dish could be repaired, though devil-spawn had done a number on it. Mineral City and its third fight with Major Darkness this winter was breaking news. Lucky me.
“Thorn St. Croix, you are called to the dais,” Elder Waldroup intoned.
Maybe Romona Benson would film me only from the rear. Or not at all, and just focus on the crowd. Maybe pigs could dance and horses could play the tuba. Maybe I’d grow wings and fly out of here. I heaved another breath, stood, and walked to the front of the old church.
At least I had found time to shower and change clothes. I wasn’t speaking before the town splattered in blood, wearing pink jammies with hearts on them. I was in my clean black battle dobok and was fully armed. Had I been wearing the fighting uniform the night before, I wouldn’t have been so badly injured, as the cloth was treated by mage masters to be impervious to the acid and ichor of the Dark, resistant to fire, and hardened to the cutting of claw and fang. Instead, I’d fought barefoot. In the snow. How dumb was that?
My feet ached and, like most of the audience, I had multiple bandages. I hadn’t had enough amulets to heal my insignificant wounds when so many had been desperately injured. There were twenty-nine bodies; four townspeople were missing and presumed eaten; twelve others were grievously wounded, resting under seraphic healing domes in the fellowship room downstairs. The domes were thought to be mine. They weren’t; they were Ciana’s, but the town didn’t know that and I wasn’t telling.