by Tess Adair
“Oh, shadow summoner,” he said. “It never ends for you, does it?”
Logan regripped her blade.
“Nothing ever ends,” she growled back at him. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to dance with me anymore. Do we really need the chaperone?”
Volkov grinned with delight.
“Oh, I’ll save the last one for you, no doubt,” he said, stepping further out of her reach as she tried to close the distance again. “But it seems you have a choice now, haven’t you? You can choose to follow me, or you can choose to save them.” With a nod of his head, he indicated the crowd. “Don’t worry. I’ll try not to take it personally.”
Just as he finished speaking, one of the Bound howled again. Logan made her choice. She let her instinct take over as she whirled around, away from the Wolf. She didn’t need to see him to know that as soon as she wasn’t looking, he disappeared again.
Anticipating the crowd, Logan dropped low before hurtling herself forward. Within seconds, she had dodged around the nearest Order members attempting to scramble away, and she got a full view of the chaos at the center.
It was a sight to behold. All three of the Bound had become monstrously distorted, as though someone had stretched them out like poorly formed clay. They still bore the remnants of their former features, but each so changed it could barely be named for its former self. Their back and shoulder muscles had rippled outward, creating a new, hunched upper body, arms hanging below their shoulders at an unnatural angle. Their wrists bent so far that they appeared broken, with gnarled, spindly claws where their hands once were.
And yet none of these changes struck Logan as quite so horrific as what had become of their faces. Their heads had been stretched, turning their eyes into oblong pools of empty black. Black veins webbed over the surface of their skin, which had turned a sickly gray color. Their jaws hung long and low, almost as if someone had grabbed them each by the chin and pulled down, hard, until they broke—and then kept pulling.
They reminded her a little of how Todd Phillips had looked when he changed—only more monstrous, more grotesque.
One of the Bound was turning its head from side to side, the last remnants of black hair swishing back and forth as it did. With no hesitation at all, it landed on the nearest human in black robes and reached one inhuman arm out, grabbing him around the neck. His hood fell backward off his head, revealing a white man Logan recognized as one of the Twelve Seers, but she couldn’t immediately call up his name.
Whoever he was, he grabbed uselessly at the hand that held him while it lifted him up, dragging him closer.
“Help me! Fucking help me!” he screamed at the crowd, at whoever was nearest, at whoever would listen.
Logan moved immediately, but the Bound moved faster. Just as she realized that the tide of long hair hanging limply off the back of its head marked it as Zilla Ulric, she brought the unknown Seer up to her mouth and clamped her new monstrous jaw right around his face.
His scream died in an instant, his whole body going limp. With a look that Logan could have sworn was glee, Ulric made a motion of tightening her grip, and gave his body a good, hard shake. Then she dropped him to the ground, like a toy that bored her.
Logan didn’t have to look long to know that he was dead.
The crowd around her had gone strangely silent. Everyone else backed away slowly, as if they thought sudden movement would attract the attention of the Bound. Within seconds, Logan stood apart from the crowd, the only person who moved forward instead of back.
Zilla Ulric turned her attention on her. She tossed back her uncannily distorted head and let out a howl.
Logan leapt forward.
Jude felt she was making pretty good progress, all things considered. Sure, they had only gone two hallways past Alexei’s door, but she was nearly carrying Eliana, after all. Of all the training she had done with Logan and Knatt, somehow they had skipped the section on supporting almost the full weight of another person while running away with any speed.
Suddenly, Eliana reached out her hand and pressed it weakly to Jude’s shoulder.
“Stop,” she said. “Set me down. Just for a second, I just—I need—”
A few feet ahead of them, there was a little alcove that housed an even littler bench, so Jude guided them over in that direction. She set Eliana down carefully on the center of the bench, then knelt in front of her. For a moment, Eliana sat with her eyes closed, her mouth still pressed shut in pain. Still, she was sitting up on her own, so Jude tried to take that as a good sign.
“I’ll…I’ll be okay,” said Eliana at last, letting out a long, slow breath. Finally, she opened her eyes again, fixing Jude with a piercing stare. “It’s over now. I just need a minute to recover.”
Jude felt the bottom of her stomach drop out.
“What do you mean, it’s over?”
Eliana took another breath and rocked back and forth on her hipbones. Then she stilled.
“The connection is gone. Atherton’s dead.”
Jude took a moment to let that sink in. If the leader of the Order of Shadows was dead, what hope did the rest of them have?
She turned back to Eliana.
“What does that mean for you?” she asked.
“Not much.” Eliana let out a short huff of air. “I feel this…this sense of loss, but it’s…physical. Like I lost an arm or something.” She shook her head, apparently gathering herself back together. “But the pain is gone. I guess that’s what matters.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Jude still didn’t quite understand what it meant to be bound to someone, let alone what the binder’s sudden death might mean.
“I will be,” said Eliana, sounding determined. “If Atherton is dead…then the others must be in trouble.”
Her gaze hardened as she gave Jude a meaningful look. Jude felt her pulse begin to quicken.
“If he’s really dead,” she said, carefully, “then…then we should go, right? Whatever killed him…we wouldn’t stand a chance against it. Right?”
Eliana shook her head immediately, her eyes shining.
“People are in danger,” she said. “I have to try to help them. What you have to do is up to you.”
Jude could see Knatt in her mind’s eye, telling her to get to safety. Beside her, Eliana stood up and stretched her neck and shoulders, as if the malady that had afflicted her only moments ago was no more serious than a touch of muscle soreness.
“Are you coming?” she asked.
In the end, Jude’s hesitation lasted only a moment.
“Yeah, I’m coming.”
Logan got in a few good hits right off the bat. She kept herself loose and limber, letting her momentum carry her past Ulric instead of at her, giving her just enough speed to avoid Ulric’s cloying grab. Logan used her continuous movement to get a look around the room while she could, to size up their whole situation. Apart from her, it was starting to look like Clément alone held her ground with the power of her cast.
It was also starting to look like Ulric had gone through the greatest transformation out of the three Bound. She was larger than the others, her neck thicker, shoulders more hunched and misshapen. And was it Logan’s imagination, or was she still getting stronger with every second that passed?
Logan made a run at her again. Hoping to cause some actual damage this time, she put more force into it, throwing all her strength and body weight into her collision with Ulric. This proved to be a miscalculation, as Ulric reached out with fast claws and grabbed her. She caught her neck in a strangle grip and held her tight.
Suddenly Logan found herself up-close and personal with what had become of Zilla Ulric’s face—her eyes sunken in so far, they looked like empty sockets, and her jaw a dark, gaping chasm. Up close, her skin looked like a half-melted candle, forming lumps where none had been before. Logan had never quite appreciated how human Ulric had previously looked.
Nor had she appreciated how easy it had once been to breathe. She
grasped at Ulric’s claws as they closed down on her throat, but the monster’s grip was like a vice. Summoning all the strength she could, Logan gave a wrenching pull…and just barely loosened the claw’s hold.
At that moment, a large spike appeared from out of nowhere, slamming right into Ulric’s hunched shoulder and knocking her aside. Logan whipped around to see who sent it.
Standing before her was an Order Adept she recognized but couldn’t name: one of the Twelve Seers, female, in her late 40s, white with white-blonde hair and blue eyes. She came forward.
“Are you hurt?” she called brusquely as she approached, her eyes on the temporarily felled Ulric.
“Pride only,” answered Logan somewhat falsely, giving her neck a tender touch. She would bruise for about a day, but she would heal.
“Good,” the woman nodded. “Then stay ready to fight. That may have been the only trick I had. I’m Janssen, by the way, and you?”
“Logan. I’m ready when she is.” With minimal reservation, she reached down to her ankle and pulled out the knife strapped there, preparing for her next round with Ulric.
“Good,” said Janssen again, repeating her terse nod. Her accent was too faint for Logan to guess it, but from the name and hair, she would pick Swedish.
Ulric was angry. She roared as she rose to her feet, one strangely overlong arm reaching up to pull the metal rod out of her body. She extracted it brutally, spraying thick black ichor onto the ground as she tossed it aside.
Her wound began to knit itself together before their eyes. Within moments, it was like it had never happened.
Logan cleared her throat as she regripped the knife. “You’re sure you could only do the rod thing once?”
Janssen’s eyes widened as Ulric roared again. “I will try.” She began mumbling her cast words and rolling up her left sleeve. With her other hand, she used a small puncture tool to make a second mark on her skin, drawing her own blood to catalyze the cast.
Ulric began to charge before Janssen’s summon could do them any good. With a sigh, Logan threw herself forward to meet her. Now, instead of trying to inflict damage that would only heal moments later, Logan opted to launch herself at Ulric’s massive back instead. She used all four limbs to wrap herself around Ulric’s body, pinning one of her arms as she did so. Ulric screamed wordlessly in protest, writhing like an animal caught off guard by a hunter’s trap. She flailed wildly with her other arm, but her limited mobility kept her from reaching backward.
Nearby, Janssen’s cast sputtered and failed.
Knowing she might not have much time left, Logan tightened her grip on the knife still clutched in her left hand. She pulled her arm back just far enough, then slammed the knife down, doing her best to aim for Ulric’s throat.
She missed. The flesh on the front of Ulric’s body had grown so contorted, the flesh of her shoulders and chest bubbled up and hardened like armor, that Logan didn’t know where to aim. Whatever she hit, it wasn’t vital—though it did seem to hurt. Ulric howled and thrashed and stumbled to the side.
Before Logan could stop her, she threw herself to the ground, backward.
Logan’s head hit the pavement hard. Stars burst behind her eyelids as her limbs lost their hold on the Bound in one fell swoop. For one split second the world seemed to blink out of existence. Then it blinked back, and the sounds of it screamed at her. She’d lost her control on her overpowered hearing, and everything in the room had gone as loud as it could go.
And then, just like that, it turned back down, all on its own.
She took a breath and blinked. I am on the floor. The world seemed tilted, and the light didn’t want to stay. She tried to push herself up, but instead her head rolled to the side, and her eyes met a gruesome sight. She had landed right next to Atherton’s empty body. His open eyes stared at her, unseeing. His jaw hung slack, almost unhinged. Spiders skittered around his corpse. They skittered toward her.
Something else was coming for her, too. Something large and cumbersome, crawling toward her. Ulric.
She had just formed the name when it was on her. Its weight pressed down on her body, its claws pricking her skin. At first, she could not move her gaze from Atherton. The spiders skittered away now, flowing down and up and away from both of them. She looked back at his face and saw that his blank eyes had begun to glow.
It looked as if he were still performing the ritual, but she knew that couldn’t be true. He was dead; he couldn’t perform anything. And yet the ritual continued.
The last time the Binding was attempted, something went wrong.
The heirophid was summoned instead.
At long last, Logan managed to turn her neck and face the thing on top of her. Ulric’s skin looked as waxy as ever, and icy breath issued forth from her gaping maw. But her eyes—her eyes seemed to have partially reverted, returning to a more human size and shape.
Those same eyes seemed to smile at her as its claw pressed down into the skin of her forehead—and slashed downward.
Logan shut her eyes tight just in time, but she felt her skin slice open as if by a razor blade. The cut trailed through her eyebrow and cheek, to the top of her mouth. As the claw moved away, she heard something that sounded like hissing.
The monster is laughing.
An energizing anger ripped through Logan’s body, and she realized that Ulric had left her right arm unpinned. With her attention now pulled into hyper focus, it was all too easy to find the first knife hidden at her waist and slip it out.
She was just positioning it when Ulric suddenly froze on top of her, its attention pulled to the side. Just like that, it jumped off her, skittering away like a spider. Logan tried to twist her head to follow it, but it disappeared from her range before she could track it.
She let her body relax again, only for a moment. Blood was streaming down her face, and her head was pounding. She needed to re-center and reorient so she could get up. She squeezed both hands tight and took a breath. Was that in her mind, or was someone pounding at the door? She struggled against the pounding, sliding her knife back into its holster so she could place both hands on the floor.
Before she could push herself up, a fuzzy blonde someone appeared in front of her, offering what might or might not have been a hand. Logan blinked. It was Janssen, and it was a hand. She took it, and Janssen used her other hand to brace her behind the shoulder as they stood.
“Thanks,” said Logan brusquely. Blood still streamed into her eyes. She reached up toward her own right shoulder, grabbed hold of the relatively cheap cloth of the robe, and pulled down hard.
“Ah, did you want—help—” Janssen’s words stumbled to a halt as Logan pressed the fabric of her former sleeve onto her face to staunch the blood.
“I’ll be fine, thank you.” She could feel the blood slowing down, her accelerated healing powers already getting to work. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Did you see where Ulric went?”
Janssen shook her head. “Someone tossed me to the ground, though not as hard as you. I tried to throw a cast at them as they ran, but—well, you saw before.”
Logan grimaced into her makeshift bandage. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but—aren’t you a Seer? Shouldn’t you have a little more staying power than that?”
Through her still open eye, Logan saw Janssen cast her gaze toward the floor.
“We were not allowed to bring our usual accoutrements into the ritual room.” She glanced briefly at Atherton’s prone form. “I believe the High Prophet suspected a spy among us.”
“By accoutrements, you mean the demon blood?” Logan did her best not to clutch the former sleeve, soaking up the primary evidence of her demon heritage. Instead, she pulled it back and used a different corner to wipe up the rest. The bleeding was done, though she imagined it didn’t look pretty.
Janssen nodded warily. “My stamina appears to have waned from lack of use. It would seem the demon blood has become a crutch.”
And yet why do I get the feeling tha
t you aren’t even close to giving it up? Logan slipped the damp sleeve into one of her pockets.
Before she had a chance to say anything more, they were interrupted by a new scream. They turned to see two fights happening at once. On one side stood Marion Clément. In an impressive bit of casting, she had summoned an entire swarm of wasps, which she now bore down on one of the Bound—the one Logan believed to be Savino Rossi. While most of the Adepts in the room couldn’t stand up to the strain of casting, Clément had entered through the side, with Logan. She had all the demon blood she needed.
On the other side, the remaining Bound bore down on a group of Order Adepts who had tried to flee. The nearest Adept, still stumbling backward, gave their best attempt at facing it down. They shouted cast words and repeatedly nicked the skin inside their elbow, but to no avail: the cast would not come. And the monster was nearly upon them.
All thoughts of her pain and the pounding forgotten, Logan sprang into action. She grabbed the knife at her waist as she ran, and she threw it with inhuman precision.
It landed square in the middle of the beast’s back. If he’d been human, it would have killed him. Instead, he let out an unearthly scream and arched his back in pain. His arms flailed, unable to reach far enough back to get the knife. Logan ran so fast she knew she risked revealing herself to anyone around her who might be conscious, but she also knew she had no other choice. Despite the pain and the unsteady quality to her vision, she bared down on her prey.
She was on him in seconds. Before he had a chance to react to her presence, she had reached up and pulled down hard on the hilt of the knife, tearing open his admittedly tough skin. Black ichor oozed from the wound as he screamed again and fell to his knees.
Grasping the knife firmly in her hand, she landed in a wide stance to face him down, challenging him to engage.
With a roar, the Bound stood up and charged at her. She stood her ground until the last second, then ducked while she slashed out with her knife, searching for its remaining weaknesses. Her knife glanced off him, but she happened to look down while it did. With a small smile, she let herself slip, let the monster believe he’d caught her. She stumbled within its reach and let it drag her close.