There were two elves directly ahead of me, three more to my left, and one from the latter group was still in the process of raising his shield, his dark aura entangled in the threads of my magic.
I banked to the left, raised my ice sword, and chucked it toward that elf. The sword struck home. As I closed in, I saw his silhouette fall to its knees, the hilt of the sword sticking out of his chest, the entire blade protruding from his back.
He spotted me approaching and tried to cast one last spell my way, but his lips wouldn’t form the words, his throat clogged with blood. His body gave out a few moments later, and he slumped over onto his side. I waited until his chest stopped shuddering, until the last ounce of life faded from his oil-black eyes. Before I motioned with two fingers, and the sword dislodged from his chest and flew back into my hand.
There came a disturbance in the air. I dropped to my knees as a second elf teleported into existence behind me. The swing of his sword missed my head by an inch, and his momentum carried him around in an arc that exposed his back. I pushed off the ground with one hand and thrust my ice blade forward with the other, ramming the sharp point underneath the elf’s ribs and up into his heart. I ripped the sword free, cleaving his heart in two.
The elf died in midair, his body carried out of sight by the bellowing winds.
Sensing the deaths of their comrades, four more elves converged on my location.
The sole woman in the group invoked the elves’ favorite electricity spell. Energy coalesced around her black fingernails and shot toward me, each faux nail extension zigzagging around in a disorienting fashion that made it hard to follow. I stomped one foot against the earth, raising a tall wall of opaque ice, and pushed off it with my other foot, driving myself back into two more oncoming elves with my arms outstretched. I clotheslined both of them, and they slipped off their feet, landing hard.
Before either could recover, I grabbed one by the collar and tossed him toward the wall, while I slammed my palm against the other’s chest and cast my quick freeze spell.
Elf number one collided with two of the black threads, which had arced around the ice wall and struck behind it in an attempt to find me. The threads instead fried the elf with two powerful jolts of electricity and sent his smoking corpse sailing off through the blizzard.
Elf number two scrabbled to counteract my freeze spell, but he couldn’t regain his composure fast enough to stop me. His entire body froze into a solid block, his mouth skewed in a horrified gasp, his frosted eyes wide and panicked, his grasping fingers stuck in place halfway to my throat.
The fourth elf of the bunch, who’d hung back from the rest to watch for an opening, recoiled in disgust at the sight of his comrade turned ice sculpture. He let out a high-pitched whistle amplified by magic that pierced the roaring winds, calling the rest of the elf guards to our position for backup. Then he pointed his sword at my face, a promise to avenge the fallen.
The female elf I’d tricked with the ice wall was the first to join his side. Her sharp teeth were bared in a vicious sneer, and another round of the electricity spell was already crackling at her fingertips.
As a cascade of mental tugs alerted me to nine more elves struggling through the storm to reach me, I kept my eyes peeled on the woman’s hands while I hefted up my new ice sculpture. Holding the frozen elf corpse in front of me like I planned to use it as a shield, I raised my sword to match the male elf’s stance and gave my opponents a challenging look.
Both of them hissed loudly at the insult to their comrade’s body and charged me. Electricity threats leaped out from the woman’s right hand. The man slashed the air with his sword, firing off a force blast shaped like a wide blade.
I didn’t budge.
The black nail extensions zipped toward me, ice shards sizzling as they came too close to the highly charged energy fields. The force blade sliced through the air, leaving behind it a comet’s tail of swirling snow. And the elf duo brought up the rear of their attacks, the gap between them widening as they made to cut off my escape routes and attack me from two sides at the same time.
Still, I didn’t move.
Not until the electricity threads were three feet from my face. Not until the force blade was six inches from my chest. Not until the two elves had drifted too far apart to renege on their attack strategy.
That was when I activated my shield bracelet.
The force blade collided with the shield and split in two. One part was redirected to my right, the other to my left, and both rebounded away from the shield at twice the speed they’d hit it.
The half that went left barreled into four approaching elves at roughly chest height, shearing straight through their shields, which had been weakened by the continual bombardment from my blizzard. Three of them were practically bisected, while the fourth had the pleasure of watching his arm detach from his shoulder and flop to the ground. All of them went down, three of them silent, the fourth man clutching his stump of an arm and shrieking.
My other targets, five elves rushing in from the right, fared better. The other half of the force blade came at them from a lower angle, and three of the five were able to jump over it, one was able to partially deflect it with her shield, and the fifth lost a foot, which cost him his balance and sent him tumbling face-first onto the frozen grass.
But the force blade wasn’t the only attack I sent their way. In the time it took the split force blade to travel to both groups of elves, the electricity threads reached my shield and discharged their payload. The instant they made contact, I mentally shouted the activation word that tripped a secondary spell I’d embedded in my personal shield bracelets for this exact occasion.
The shield, instead of repelling the electricity, reversed its function and absorbed it all. For a second, the shield lit up like a Christmas tree, a thousand tiny pockets of energy humming along its shell. Then I redirected the energy—at the elves to my right who’d jumped the force blade and still hadn’t reached the ground.
A massive lightning bolt erupted from my shield, accompanied by the earsplitting crack of thunder, and engulfed all three of the airborne elves. Two of them were blasted so far away they disappeared into the churning blizzard, and one practically exploded, charred pieces pelting the elf who’d lost his foot. The female elf who’d deflected the force blade was blown back by the shockwave from the lightning strike, her shield shattering as she hit the ground.
I spun back around to face the two elves who’d thrown the destructive spells in the first place. The man was in the process of taking a running leap so he could teleport and attack me from behind. The woman, with an angry battle cry warbling from her mouth, held her sword aloft in one hand while she gathered energy in the other to cast yet another electricity spell.
I threw my ice sculpture at the space between them.
Caught off guard, they both faltered as the frozen corpse sailed toward them. They faltered even more when I clenched my fist…and the ice sculpture exploded. A jagged piece of frozen leg impaled the woman in the gut, sweeping her off her feet, and her electricity spell fizzled out. Meanwhile, the entire frozen head whacked the man upside his own head, cracking his skull and knocking him out of his trajectory. He smacked the ground with a dull thump and didn’t get back up.
The woman tried to dislodge the leg from her abdomen, but it was jammed awkwardly between her pelvis and ribcage. She couldn’t stand. She couldn’t fight. So I casually strolled up to her, raised my sword, and plunged it through her heart. She died with a half-finished curse on her lips, her magic fizzling out with a black puff of smoke that was carried away by the wind. Her partner followed her shortly thereafter, without more interference from me; a quick check revealed his skull had shattered inward and shredded his brain.
Only three elves were left alive in my immediate vicinity, and only one was standing. However, I sensed more on the way.
These approaching elves are the last of them. As soon as they go down, I can make a run at Abarta’s shie
ld. All I have to do is puncture it in a small spot, slip a spell through, and wreck the circle—
A horrible cramp seized my abdomen, and I almost doubled over. At the same time, the winds of my blizzard slowed considerably, the roar devolving to a low moan, the snowfall lightning to a flurry. The cramp passed after a second, and the blizzard regained its strength, but not without a mental push that made the charms for my two glamours begin to grow uncomfortably warm.
I was using too much power too soon after suffering serious injuries. If I pushed much harder, my body would break, and so would my soul glamour.
Nothing may come of that, I thought, trying to reassure myself. You’ll just lose the ability to lie, that’s all.
I pinched my eyes shut and took a slow breath to compose myself. Only for Hel’s face—her real face, that petrifying visage of Death—to flash across the back of my eyelids.
Perhaps nothing would come of dropping my sixth glamour. But I wasn’t going to make bets on that in such a dire situation. Breaking my last whole glamour would be a last resort.
Compromising, I whispered the words that dispelled my variable mind glamour and recouped the energy I’d stored within the charm to give myself a boost. My human side wouldn’t be of much use in this situation anyway, so it was pointless to expend energy just to keep it on the backburner.
Under similar reasoning, I also shrank the diameter of the raging blizzard. The remaining elves wouldn’t be able to push me farther away from the summoning circle, so filling the whole valley with my storm was a waste of effort.
As those two changes took effect, my budding fatigue abated.
It wouldn’t last though. I needed to hurry the hell up and finish this.
I looked in the direction of the hill where Drake and Kennedy were hiding, the terrain rendered nothing but a vague shape by the thick vortex of snow and ice. Any day now, dhampir. Any day. I am not some limitless sídhe general. If you don’t swoop in soon with your favorite trick, we’re both going to end up on the chopping block.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The elf who’d lost his foot was the first to lose his throat.
As the lone elf left standing—the woman who’d deflected the force blade—faced me with her sword raised and her black eyes bright with a thirst for revenge, the elf who’d had his foot lobbed off dragged himself to safety behind her and then worked to staunch the bleeding from his ankle stump.
The elf who’d lost his arm was sitting about fifteen feet away from the pair, holding his severed arm to his shoulder and muttering what I assumed was a healing spell meant to reattach severed limbs. Neither of the injured elves was a threat while they were focused on recovery, so I kept my gaze trained on the female elf, who looked ready to lunge like an animal and take a bite out of me.
In hindsight, it was kind of ironic that a bite was what killed her. What killed all of them.
Just as the woman geared up to take a shot at me, her dark aura billowing outward from her body like a cloud of toxic smoke, a flash of turquoise light in the distance behind her caught my attention. A second flash lit up the swirling snow a couple seconds later in the same general direction. A third came right on its tail, much closer than its predecessors. So close in fact that I briefly observed the silhouette of a body at the heart of the light.
A fourth flash and a fifth occurred in quick succession, these two on either side of me. One around the body of the female elf who’d taken a frozen leg to the stomach. The other around the man who’d been brained by the frozen head.
Five bodies engulfed by the magic signature. Five bodies turned into puppets on strings.
The elf who’d been preparing to attack me hesitated, her thin brows furrowed in confusion as the turquoise energy seeped into the corpses of her fallen kin. “What trick is this, half-blood?” she growled.
“Not my trick.” I relaxed my fighting stance and planted the tip of my ice sword into the ground. “It’s an old favorite of a former associate of yours. I’m sure you’ll recognize it in about, oh, five seconds or so.”
The corpse with the leg in its gut began to twitch. The corpse with the shattered skull did the same. The twitching gradually morphed into hard spasms, until their limbs were jerking wildly back and forth. And then, as if someone flipped a switch, their movements shifted from wild and erratic to smooth and fast.
Both corpses braced their hands against the earth, planted one knee between their arms, and pushed themselves to their feet. Their eyes were glazed over with the film of death, but their teeth told a story of a perverted kind of second life. Each elf now sported a pair of short fangs, shaped differently from the rest of their standard pointy teeth.
Such fangs were the distinctive feature of a damned and pitiful species. Neamh-mairbh.
“The necromancer,” hissed the female elf, grip tightening on her sword. “He’s betrayed us!”
I laughed. “Oh please. He was never on your side to begin with.”
The elf zombie to my left ripped the frozen leg from its abdomen, hefted the limb like a club, let out a vicious snarl, and sprang at the woman. The zombie with the broken skull followed its partner’s lead, aiming for the elf who’d lost his foot.
Frozen leg met sword with a clang and a crack. The leg shattered, the sword abruptly slipping free, and the woman staggered to the side, leaving the man behind her with no protection.
The brained zombie pounced on the man, who failed to draw a weapon in time because his blood-slicked hands couldn’t properly grasp the hilt of his knife. He grabbed the zombie by its flailing arms and grappled with it. But the corpse, which felt no pain, dislocated both its shoulders so it could latch on to the man’s neck with its teeth.
Fangs sank into tender flesh, and the zombie bit down, bit deep, and thrashed side to side until a huge chunk of the elf’s neck tore free. Choking, the elf man collapsed onto his back, and the zombie of his former comrade pinned him down and went to work.
A few feet away, the woman fared no better against the other zombie. It had wrapped itself around her torso, preventing the woman from using her sword. She tried to pry it off with concentrated force punches and magic-augmented tugs. But even as the zombie’s body began to fall apart at the seams, it didn’t let her go.
It viciously stabbed her with a chunk of icy flesh left over from the leg, again and again and again. Until one of the hits nailed the woman in the spinal cord and temporarily paralyzed her from the chest down. Unfortunately for the elf woman, the zombie didn’t give her a chance to heal. As soon as she collapsed, the zombie sank its hungry maw into her neck.
While those two zombies finished their appetizers, three more rose to their feet, dark and crooked silhouettes in the field of white snow, their movements odd and disconcerting. One of them staggered into view and set its sights on the male elf who was desperately trying to reattach his arm.
The man noticed it coming and, realizing he was out of time, threw his arm aside and made to recover his dropped sword instead. The zombie didn’t give him the chance. It was on him in a second, practically flying as the wind carried it toward its prey. It slammed into his back, tackling him to the ground, and ripped into his throat before he could scream.
I watched the zombies drink their fill of blood with a sense of detachment. I loathed neamh-mairbh for what they’d done to Kinsale at Vianu’s behest, but there was something about these particular zombies, made from svartálfar and not humans, something about the way they killed their living counterparts without reserve, that gave the whole scene an air of poetic justice. And there was more justice to be had, I knew, because the rest of the svartálfar guard was nearing my position, and they had no idea what was waiting for them.
Drake’s turquoise aura snaked out of the soil and seeped into the fresh bodies of the elves who’d just been slaughtered. The woman who’d faced me with such determination rose with a blank face and a bloody, ragged neck, reclaimed her sword, and turned around to face the oncoming guards. The man with one f
oot sat up on his knees, prepared to crawl since he couldn’t walk. The man with one arm stood up jerkily, kicking his own detached arm out of his way.
On some unheard cue from Drake, the two zombies that hadn’t yet joined the fray, their forms partially obscured by the storm, rushed the oncoming guards. A moment passed, and an undulating chain of terrified yells sailed toward me on the back of the wind. Those yells were the second cue, and as they faded under the roar of the storm, the zombies before me split into two groups and took off in different directions. The guards must’ve been driven apart by the ambush, and now Drake was using his puppets to flank them from two sides.
I waited. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
The zombies arrived. The zombies attacked. The svartálfar fell screaming in terror. And for each one that died, a new zombie was born.
There was no victory in sight for bodies with beating hearts. The elves had lost the moment the first of their corpses began to rise.
Plucking my sword from the ground, I strode toward the summoning circle. I gave the battle between the elves and zombies a wide berth, but even so, a severed hand bounced to a stop near my boot.
Undeterred, I kicked it aside and picked up my pace, using the even rhythm of my footsteps like a metronome to calm my thoughts and center my soul and pool what little energy I had left in the center of my chest, ready to be expelled in whatever form I chose.
Light from Abarta’s shield broke through the haze of my blizzard first, a golden glow that glinted off my ice and snow. As I neared the shield, the glow coalesced into a translucent wall whose light was not actually uniform. Wherever my ice touched it, the shield flared brighter to repel it, creating a constantly moving mosaic of light and dark.
What Dawn Demands Page 20