Last Rites (Darkling Mage Book 6)

by Nazri Noor

  I sniffed a little, surprised that I was getting so emotional. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been. There was a reason I’d been avoiding coming to her grave all this time, after all. It still hurt, after all these years, knowing that Diana Graves was no longer with us, and it hurt even more knowing that someone I once trusted had been responsible for her death. I reached under my shirt, probing for the star-metal necklace that had once belonged to her. I held its coolness against my fingers, traced the facets of the garnet that served as its pendant.

  “I wish you could see me now, Mom. I’m a wizard.” I laughed out loud, still unused to how ridiculous that sounded in my own ears. “Okay, I’m a mage. There’s all these subtle distinctions to this shit, and I’m pretty sure a wizard is someone who’s spent a lot of time learning magic, which is so not me. But I can teleport through shadows. I can make fire with my bare hands. Isn’t that insane?”

  God, it felt good to talk, even knowing she wouldn’t ever answer.

  “And I’m helping people,” I said, finally settling down. “I’m finally doing something good with my life, Mom. I can’t believe it myself.”

  And as I eased further into the grass, spreading my legs in front of me to get comfortable as I prepared to tell my mother’s headstone every single damn detail of my life in the arcane underground, I realized that the air was different. Not the air, exactly, but the atmosphere. There was the ambient birdsong, the rustle of leaves as wind blew through the trees, and the distant sounds of traffic, far outside the cemetery.

  But there was something else there, a distant, familiar humming. And layered with it was a strange sort of a whistle, a keening sound, like a massive kettle about to boil.

  No. Not again.

  I sprang to my feet, scanning the graveyard for the source of the noise, but Latham’s Cross was clear. No, the dirge of the Eldest was being sung from somewhere further off. My heart pounded as I watched the clouds swirling above the city, as an ominous, searing white light gathered just behind them, like a terrible, eldritch sun.

  “The dead,” Asher’s voice droned behind me. I turned to him, his blazing green eyes sweeping Latham’s Cross, his hands over his ears. “Carver. I see them, I hear them.”

  Carver said nothing, his own false eye glowing like amber, watching the pillar of light falling from out of the sky, like a fist from the heavens.

  “The dead,” Asher breathed. “They’re screaming.”

  Chapter 8

  Carver flicked his wrist at the ground, and before either Asher or I could react the grass burst into brilliant amber flames. I held my breath. Relax, Dust. It was just a teleportation spell. Where we were going, though, I couldn’t be sure.

  The fire consumed me, skin and muscle and molecules, and in an orange flash of light the flames blossomed again, returning our bodies to this reality, in a different location. Only – I wasn’t sure where that was, exactly.

  This wasn’t Valero, not the Valero I knew. Those flattened trees, the broken lampposts with transformers and power lines still hissing with live electricity, the shattered gray and painted white asphalt of a road that had been blown to fragments. A crumpled sign by the side of the road welcomed and wished you a great stay in Valero.

  We were just outside the city, just near the limits. And I would have heaved a sigh of relief if it wasn’t for the cars that had been struck by the impact of the Eldest’s attack.

  Twisted heaps of metal, some burning, others smashed flat into the ground. Dozens of them, motorists going in and out of the city who had no idea that this particular drive was meant to be their last. Among the smoldering heaps of rubber and the broken bits of street spread pools of crimson blood.

  My heart was so far up my throat that I could hardly breathe. We’d always been around to save the day before. Whether it was the boys of the Boneyard, or Team Lorica, in whatever configuration, we were there to stop people from dying. But not that day.

  There were no survivors. Asher told me so.

  “This can’t be happening,” I stammered. “Carver? We weren’t even near this place. I thought I was the lodestar. The Eldest can only destroy what they can see, and I’m all that they can find.”

  Carver gnawed on the backs of his knuckles, his enchanted eye glowing as it scanned the devastation, his real one hardened, burning with fury. He answered in a measured, steady voice.

  “Things have changed, Dustin. For the worse.”

  I walked among the wreckage, checking in the cars, my stomach churning as I saw broken, battered pieces of what used to be people. No one was moving. I couldn’t hear voices of normals asking for help, of anyone crying. Some twisted part of me kept hoping that I would hear someone, something. But nothing.

  Except for the strange, thick gurgling that came from within the earth.

  I whipped around towards the noise of it, startled to find what looked like a shiny, black bubble inflating, gaining in size, welling up from the cracks between the asphalt. Wait. That looked familiar. The bubble kept growing, something inside of it pulsing, writhing, slithering.

  Oh no.

  “Shrikes,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. “How?”

  “They’re salting the earth,” Carver said. “The Old Ones mean to truly overwhelm us this time, not just with destruction. More of these things will rise, to bring more of these accursed creatures into our world.”

  Asher scowled. “Like a factory seeded in our reality? They’ll just keep coming?”

  “But this didn’t happen at the fairgrounds,” I said. “I was there last night.”

  Carver rounded on me, his teeth bared. “You were what? And where?”

  I gaped for a moment. “I – I was exploring the Dark Room, and the Bazaar of – it’s a convocation of oracle entities. They pulled me into the carnival again. Madam Babbage? That’s Baba Yaga.”

  Asher gaped even harder. “She’s what? Holy crap.”

  “You might have considered sharing this little snippet with me, Dustin,” Carver snarled. “We’ll discuss this later. For now, we have a massive problem to deal with.”

  “Agreed,” I said, nodding shakily. More and more of the polyps rose from the earth, glistening black sacs that looked exactly like those Thea had created on the beanstalk from hell she summoned at the Nicola Arboretum. There were dozens – no, scores of them popping up all over the place, like mushrooms.

  Then the first one split at the seams, tentacles slipping out of its membrane, probing at the air. The shrikes were coming.

  I readied my connection to the Dark Room, in case I needed its spikes and swords to do my work for me. Asher slashed his hand through the air, great pillars of sharpened bone erupting from the ground, skewering the first of the shrikes. Carver muttered in foreign, yet by now familiar words behind us, an incantation I’d heard enough times to recognize as his disintegration spell.

  I used the time to form a sphere of fire in the palm of my hand, clutching it close to my chest, infusing it with more heat, more flame, more of my anger. Enough of the polyps had burst to birth at least two dozen shrikes, their horrific shrieks filling the air as they staggered and dashed towards us. I twisted at the hip, ready to pitch the fireball at the oncoming rank of abominations –

  When a flash of something that shimmered like glass cleaved through the air – and through the entire row of shrikes closest to us. They screamed from the multitudes of mouths embedded in their bodies and tentacles, severed through the hip, at the torso in gushing spurts of horrible black blood, like a massive, invisible blade had been run through them in one go.

  My pulse quickened. “Bastion?” I called out, not even sure where he was.

  “Here,” he called back, dashing up to join us.

  Sebastion Brandt nodded at me primly, then clenched his fist. Piles of debris rose into the air, held by his power. He fired them into a deadly salvo of improvised ammunition, a hail of gunfire. Broken asphalt and twisted metal tore through the shrikes, ripping them into blackened, bloody pi
eces.

  I hurled a fireball, savoring the explosion as it blasted a half dozen shrikes, then nudged Bastion with my elbow. “Is the rest of the Lorica coming?”

  He nodded. “Us first, but more are arriving soon.” He nudged one thumb over his elbow, then lifted a massive piece of rubble into the air, launching it like a cannonball. The shrikes screeched.

  I followed where he pointed, not at all sure how to react to the sight of Royce hurrying to join the fight. A Scion of the Lorica, Royce possessed a curious mix of arcane gifts, including an acceptable talent for throwing fireballs. Okay, maybe he was better than me at it, I’m willing to admit that much.

  But a huge fireball, bigger than a beachball, hotter than anything I could muster, soared over our heads, striking the shrikes in their midst and sending them scattering like so many flaming bowling pins.

  “Romira,” I breathed as she calmly strode up to us. “Good to see you.”

  “Happy to see you too, Dusty,” she said, in a voice that belied the urgency of the situation. She turned to Asher, giving him a sly wink. I definitely caught how it made him miss just a single beat in his spellcasting, the walls and spires of bone he summoned suddenly dissipating into dust.

  “Focus,” Carver hissed.

  “Sorry,” Asher mumbled. His fists glowed green, and he redoubled his efforts, raising a barrier of bone big enough, certainly sharp enough to utterly crush another dozen of the shrikes.

  Yet they wouldn’t stop coming.

  Chapter 9

  “How long do we have to keep this up?” I shouted at Carver.

  He bared his teeth as he threw another disintegration spell. “We’ve been at it too long already.” His eyes cast over us quickly, and within seconds, he’d made his decision. “Asher and Bastion, help me hold off these creatures.” He nodded at each of us as he spoke our names. “Romira. Dustin. Royce. All at once, on my word, focus your minds on fire, and burn the ground these abominations are standing on.”

  Royce curled his fingers, both of his hands blooming with pillars of young fire. “Scorch the earth?”

  Carver nodded. “Scorch the earth.”

  And as my mentor and master commanded, so we followed. I watched as Romira held her arms apart, gathering her power, marveling at the gargantuan orb of fire she was creating. Fucking hell, I couldn’t compete with that. Royce was building two smaller ones that were still far huger than average. Okay, I thought. Okay, Dustin. Just make sure yours is bigger than his.

  “Size matters,” I muttered under my breath.

  Royce looked over at me. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I could feel my veins fill with liquid fire as I strained harder than ever to call on the flames. The spaces between my fingers, between my toes, even, sizzled with unseen heat, and it felt as though the tips of my hair were sparking with power.

  “Now,” Carver shouted.

  As one the three of us pushed our magic forth, hurling everything we had, not at the shrikes, but at the ground itself. The forces of all our fireballs met, clashing, at first, then swirling into a vortex of crazed air and angry flame. They struck the earth, roaring, climbing into an inferno large enough to – holy shit, to take out all the shrikes. Like we’d just bombed them. Scorched the earth.

  The flames crackled, burning what was left of the shrikes in a pyre that reached to the sky, their remains like kindling. Grimly I thought of the dead motorists, how our fires were surely burning away their bodies as well, a cremation of sorts.

  But this was how the Lorica did things. One way or another, they would have to find some way to cover this up, to make the normals think that it was just an accident. A gas explosion, perhaps – one that, against all logic, burned an entire pileup of almost perfectly flattened cars.

  Bastion gave a belated whoop of victory. “It’s over,” he said, pointing at where the shrikes’ sacs had initially taken root. “There. Look.”

  The membranes and polyps, even the ones that hadn’t birthed shrikes yet, had been burned away completely. Whatever profane magics the Eldest used to seed the ground itself with their slavering minions, arcane fire had been enough to stop them.

  “We’ve stopped one assault,” Carver said, his voice deathly cold. “But we do not know how many more are coming.”

  Asher sighed, his eyes limned in green flame once more. “All dead. So many of them.”

  Bastion deflated, sticking his hands into his coat pockets, saying nothing. A hand found its way to my shoulder, squeezing.

  “We couldn’t have stopped this,” Romira said. “We can’t hold anyone responsible for what happened here, Dusty. This is all on the Eldest.”

  I resisted the urge to shrug Romira off just then. Who said that I felt any guilt in the matter? Who said that I felt responsible? I said nothing, chewing my lip, my cheeks burning with anger, at her, at myself.

  Romira got it completely right, though. Something in me still believed it was my fault. But what Carver said must have been true. The Eldest had found ways to infiltrate our reality without using me as their beacon, and there was no telling where or when they would strike again.

  Instead I deflected, as I always did. It was easier, sometimes, than just dealing with difficult thoughts, with emotions. I patted Romira’s hand, smiling at her as I gently removed it from my shoulder.

  I nodded at our friends from the Lorica. Yes, I realize I just used the word “friend” to describe Royce there, but let’s be honest. He did try to help me when the Heart was trying to track me down. That counts for something. Truthfully, it counts for a lot.

  “So what,” I said. “You guys are all buddies now?”

  Romira studied her fingernails, buffing them against the sleeve of her jacket. “I guess you could say that.” She gave Royce a pointed look, smacking him on the shoulder.

  “What?” Royce protested. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I saw that,” Romira growled, wagging one perfectly manicured finger in his face. “I said you needed to cut back on drinking, especially on the job.”

  The hell were they talking about?

  Bastion shook his head. “You need to not carry a flask around with you, Royce. Everyone can smell the whiskey on your breath. There has to be a better way to deal with your stress.”

  “The fuck there is,” Royce snarled, producing a pack of cigarettes from his coat. He brought one to his lips, lighting it shakily, only really relaxing when he’d blown out a plume of white smoke. “You’re not the ones who have to clean up this fucking mess. The hell am I supposed to tell the papers? The hell am I supposed to tell the Heart?”

  Romira shook her head at me. “If it’s not the whiskey, it’s the cigarettes. You know, I tried throwing them out, too, but he keeps so many backup packs hidden around his apartment.”

  “His what now?” I said. I’m not sure why it took me so long to pick up on it, but I finally figured out what she meant from seeing Asher’s downcast eyes, his crestfallen expression. “Oh. Oh? You two? Really?”

  Royce grunted, but said nothing, quietly blowing out another stream of smoke.

  “I mean I guess you could call it that,” Romira said. “Dating.”

  I turned to Bastion. “And you. What is this, like some kind of throuple?”

  Bastion blinked at me for some moments, then blushed. “No, it’s not that at all. Work-related stuff.”

  “And the reason Prudence isn’t with you?”

  He shrugged. “Again. Work-related stuff. She’s got her beat, I’ve got mine.”

  Strange, I thought. The two of them were basically partners from the time I’d first met them at the Lorica. Surely if there was any bad blood between them I’d have heard about it from Prudence or Gil. Hmm. Something seemed off.

  “If you’re all quite finished catching up,” Carver said, “there’s still the matter of the Eldest. Gentlemen.” He nodded to Asher and myself. “We should be going. The Lorica will be here any moment now, and I expect they’ll want to pin th
e blame on Dustin yet again.”

  Royce exhaled, his cigarette smoke drifting up to join the clouds billowing off the inferno we’d made together. “No objections here.” He tapped his cigarette, snorting loudly. “He’s probably right, anyway.”

  See, even Royce believed me now. If I could get him to understand – shit, surely there was some way to get the entities to listen, too. But who would help us? Where would I even start?

  As Carver’s sending spell consumed our bodies, burning us out of existence, I felt something move in my pocket. My phone? Ah. Sterling texting me, I guessed, with what I could only hope was the Twilight Tavern’s phone number.

  I kept my fingers crossed.

  Chapter 10

  “Yes,” I barked into my cellphone, pacing up and down my bedroom, my footsteps beating out a rhythm to match the pounding of my heart. Reception in the Boneyard could be so fuzzy sometimes, and it was even more annoying because of how urgent the matter was. “The All-Father. Could you put him on the line, please? That’s right. Odin.”

  “I’m not certain that this is the best idea,” said a woman with a vaguely indiscernible accent on the other line.

  “Olga? Is that you? Or Helga, was it?”

  “What!” The voice took on an impertinent, almost offended tone. “Who is this? Mister Sterling, is that you? If you’ve called for another one of your so-called sexy conversations, I will have you know that I am presently manning the front desk, and sexy conversations are only permitted between the hours of – ”

  “Helga, no, it’s me, Dustin Graves.”

  The voice stopped. “Who?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I was with the party that came to the Tavern that one time? I’m friends with Sterling.”

  Helga hesitated. “I am not certain.”

  I sighed. “Okay, fine. There were four of us. There was Sterling, then the big and hairy one, then the Japanese guy, and then there’s me.”