Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  I’m not sure where Gwen took him, but it’s got to be safer than here, right? I said, after charging, bull-style, straight into about a dozen mages and sending them flying. I saw a few of their shields wink out on impact, and I wondered if that meant they would stay down. Human-me was worried I’d killed them. Dragon-me, honestly, wasn’t. I brushed aside the worry that there seemed to be a distinction between the two mes as something that I could figure out later.

  I can try calling Gwen and ask her to bring him to you, I added, since I could tell Rhelia was still a bit tense, and I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t understand just how worried she was about Trev.

  Rhelia snorted a few tendrils of smoke.

  I trust her to care for him. I am merely upset that he is missing this fight. I believe he will be upset not to have participated.

  I laughed, accidentally incinerating the mage who’d been charging at me with an actual, honest-to-Gwen, flaming sword.

  Luckily, it was only a short burst of flame, and somehow managed not to light anything else on fire. Weirdly, the sword continued to burn, even after the charred top half of the mage disintegrated and the legs toppled awkwardly after it.

  Good shot; that sword would have pierced even the thickest dragon hide. Rhelia’s praise was casual, albeit sincere, as if I’d done that on purpose. As if I’d somehow known that the sword was deadly to dragons, and not like I’d accidentally just laughed and killed a man. The human part of me felt a bit queasy, but the human part of me was decidedly not in charge right now, so maybe I had known. Maybe that hadn’t been as much of an accident as I’d thought.

  And then I didn’t care whether it was an accident or not, because something had just shanked me in the shin. Or rather, I discovered as I looked down, someone had just bitten one of my forelegs. The “someone” was a vampire, that was clear enough, and apparently vampire teeth were another thing (besides flaming swords) that could pierce through dragon hide. Not that it felt like it was doing much damage, since vampires are quite a bit smaller than dragons, even a baby dragon like me.

  I reared up on my back legs and shook my foreleg fiercely. The vamp did not let go.

  I turned and battered him against the side of one of the concrete parking barriers nearby.

  He still didn’t let go.

  I slammed my foreleg into the ground.

  He was still there.

  The whole thing was starting to piss me off. It barely hurt, but having a vampire stuck to my leg was not going to help this fight, and besides, I’d felled a vamp in my human form before with a solid knee to the nuts. What the hell was letting this vampire cling to me like the world’s angriest Corgi in beast mode?

  I didn’t know how he was doing it, but I’d just decided I was going to show him who was running this show, when I felt a few more sharp pains along my back legs and sides.

  The fuck?

  I craned my long neck around to stare down at a good dozen vampires sticking to me, even as I began dancing around trying to shake them off. Those damned diamond skulls must give them the jaw strength of snapping turtles. They. Weren’t. Coming. OFF!

  I had just taken in a breath to douse the one on my arm in dragon fire, when I remembered the burns on my sides and arms from the damned tank I’d lit on fire. They were still sore, despite my Az-boost and sped up healing. So I shot a bunch of smoke out of my nostrils, instead of the burst of fire I’d been considering releasing.

  Fine. If these assholes wanted to leech onto me, they could just try to stick around while I—

  My legs collapsed beneath me like jello.

  What. The. Fuck?

  My eyelids started to droop, my head dipping slowly towards my chest, leaving my neck closer to the ground, though none of the vamps let go of their holds to take advantage of it.

  Help, I sent out to Rhelia, or whoever was close by that could hear mental communication. For once, I was trying to broadcast.

  Rhelia must have been busy.

  No one replied.

  My eyelids drooped a little bit more. My head sank lower to the ground.

  Then my vision began to tunnel, and all the sounds of battle dropped away.

  Then silver feathers, and the faint sounds of someone screaming.

  Huh. Sounded painful.

  I’M NOT SURE how I’d managed to forget how efficient Azrael was when it came to killing vampires. I mean, they had taken out Edik in about ten seconds. And ok, yeah, that hadn’t stuck, but they’d also managed to incapacitate a room full of vamps in about 90 seconds.

  Whatever. A lot had happened since Az had said they loathed vampires, and I’d kinda forgotten it in the insanity of everything that had happened afterwards, but I wasn’t likely to ever forget it again.

  My eyes popped open after the first few vampires released me, and I got to watch, in stunned awe, as Azrael took out the remaining vampires. Az was stunning to look at normally, no matter which of their forms they took (as long as it wasn’t red naked squirrel form), but now, as they swooped from vamp to vamp, draining the vamps’ energy so that each one collapsed to the ground looking like nothing more than an attractive corpse, they were positively glowing. No, literally. Az was exuding light like an exuberantly decorated Christmas tree. Or maybe a lightning bug hopped up on coke, since they were zigging and zagging faster than my eye could track, and vibrating with…something. Souls? Life force?

  That was the only thing I could come up with, because I knew Az fed off of people’s souls, and the vamps that were now falling like moths that had gotten too close to a flame seemed…drained, empty, colorless.

  Of course, that was probably how any animated corpse that had lost its animation looked, but still.

  Az was exuding power like a flying torch.

  Something about the vamps releasing me had returned enough energy to me to let me open my eyes and turn my head, but it wasn’t until all the vamps had dropped, and Az swooped past me to plant a steaming kiss on my scaled snout, that I felt strong enough to stand up.

  That kiss felt like a living flame. I wasn’t just restored. I was on fire, and I realized that a dozen vamps worth of energy must have been quite the power hit, because Az had glow to spare and they were more than happy to share it with me.

  I felt the energy spread through my body like a wildfire, and I flapped my wings in exultation, looking around the field of battle for a new target.

  But then an orange streak in the sky caught my eye, and I looked up just in time to see Trev, in Phoenix form, dive-bomb another group of MOME mages who had been about to take aim at Rhelia.

  Well, damn. I had no idea what had finally woken Trev up, but he seemed to be fine. I felt something untwist inside me, and realized that I’d been more worried about Trev than I’d let myself admit, even once he was safely under Gwen’s protection.

  Az had already flown away and returned to the fight before I could even utter a thank you.

  Time to get back into the fight.

  I didn’t see any more conscious vampires anywhere, so dragon-me’s intense desire for vengeance was just going to have to wait for a bit. Meanwhile, Az’s brightly glowing form was flitting all over the place wreaking havoc wherever they went.

  Rhelia was tearing into the mages with abandon, with Trev’s assistance, and I was about to join her.

  Meanwhile, every now and again I saw what looked like wisps of smoke appear around a person carrying a gun, and then that person seemed to disappear. Which explained why I hadn’t seen Renata lately, and why there were very few mind control victims left.

  We were still outnumbered almost two to one, despite having wiped out a good portion of MOME’s mage forces in the past few minutes, and even with two dragons on our side, that still seemed like a lot.

  I could only assume that the main reason they hadn’t attacked en masse again was because we’d killed the majority of the leadership. Which raised the question of why they were attacking at all.

  And also made me wonder why we s
till only had two dragons.

  General Aira has refused to issue reinforcements. Rhelia’s mental voice sounded pissed, and I couldn’t honestly blame her. She is keeping herself and our army hidden in a pocket dimension until ready to be deployed.

  Did she give a reason for that? I asked.

  She claimed to be holding our forces in strategic reserve. Rhelia’s mental communication managed to convey all her disdain for that plan, without any additional words.

  Do you think she’s betrayed us, somehow? I asked, not sure how she could have, or if she would have, but feeling like that was just the way today was going.

  Rhelia sent the mental equivalent of a shrug.

  Right. Ok. Super reassuring.

  But then I didn’t have time to think about all the shitty potential consequences of betrayal by the commander of our own reinforcements, because I was busy batting away another handful of mages who had decided to consolidate their power and send something truly nasty my way. Except, I sent those mages flying before the spell finished forming, causing their half-formed spell to ricochet off the spell of a second set of nearby mages and scatter everyone in a three-meter radius. The first spell had still been just an amorphous blob, and it latched onto one of the mages and sent him screaming, thrashing, and running away from the group. The other spell showed a striking resemblance to Thanatos in his Cthulhu/clam form, and it started devouring the nearby mages indiscriminately. It looked like I had knocked both groups out of their containment circles, which was great for distracting the mages and perhaps getting them eaten by demons, but I kinda doubted that whatever demons had been summoned were going to just call it a day after they’d devoured the mages who’d summoned them. Especially when the thing that looked like Thanatos expanded to its full size, which, yeah…either there was more than one clam/cthulhu-dark-matter-consuming-demon in the world, or that was Thanatos.

  Although, since he hadn’t exploded and taken us all down with him, I was willing to consider that it was maybe just Thanatos’ cousin or something.

  Then the thing turned its crazy, protruding eyes at me, and waved a tentacle in my general direction.

  Huh, maybe it was Thanatos after all. Or maybe…

  Maybe that was just a distraction to keep me from launching myself at yet another MOME recruit, who was busy stabbing the amorphous blob with a syringe on the far side of the parking lot. Far out of my reach.

  Pushing the plunger in before I could so much as take one step forward.

  MUCH TO MY surprise, I wasn’t dead. A quick look around the area proved that most everyone I loved also was not dead. I still didn’t understand why the few MOME lackeys I’d run into who had tried to inject people I love with Technetium seemed to think there was even the slightest chance that a hazmat suit might protect them.

  Because what I’d just witnessed was horrifying, and had definitely killed the guy who injected the blob with Technetium—who had not been wearing a hazmat suit, not that I thought it would have helped—but at least it wasn’t the insane, world-ending event that I had expected.

  The blob had exploded in spectacular fashion. It was more a light show than an explosion really, like someone had put a billion microscopic Christmas lights into a piñata and then shot it with a Death Star. It absolutely incinerated the MOME guy with the syringe, as well as everyone else in a radius of about ten meters of the demon who’d been injected. Which, as far as I could tell, had consisted solely of more MOME agents.

  It was difficult to tell, if only because I was still blinking away the blinding points of light. And also because the dozen MOME mages weren’t the only casualties of the event.

  Time and space seemed to have taken a hit as well.

  Because, holy shit, as if my ears had suddenly come back online after a brief delay, there was a brain-shearing sound, like the rending of a million sheets of tinfoil all at once.

  And then I could see an orange sky with a purple sun, still framed by our blue sky with its white-yellow sun; a sight that was enough to make me feel nauseous on its own, but it didn’t end there. Nope. It did not.

  Because out of the desert under the orange sky with the purple sun poured hundreds, possibly a thousand or more, demons.

  And, ok, maybe now I understood what Dryer had meant, when she was raving about being knee deep in bodies thanks to an invasion…

  It was difficult to tell how many there were, because they were all changing shape as soon as they tumbled through the tear in the seam and onto Earth. Beings that started out as furless squirrels, furry bunnies, tiny goats, poofy owls, fuzzy otters, strange ducks, and a whole host of other mostly harmless looking animals poured into earth as creatures straight out of nightmares, bringing the pungent scent of sulphur with them.

  A small handful, perhaps the other succubi, appeared angelic as they flew through the bright Phoenix sky, giant feathered wings on the backs of gorgeous humanoids, but the majority took on forms that had too many limbs, tentacles, or proboscises to count, all of which were attached to giant, fang-filled maws, or horrible suctioning mouths, or, ew, honestly, it was getting too gross for me to keep track of.

  “Well, fuck,” I was startled to hear myself say aloud.

  I was back in human form, though I’d made no conscious decision to switch. I would have liked to take the time to wonder about that: had the rip in the seam knocked me into my human form? How did that even work? But the creatures were stumbling through the tear in the seam in droves, and immediately setting upon, well, everyone. They were attacking MOME’s forces, they were attacking our Unterberger allies, and in a moment I would love to scour from my retinae, but probably never will, I even saw Ms. Rebuke tear off her shirt and launch herself into the arms of a succubus, just before it took off into the sky and left the site of the battle entirely.

  The demons were attacking our ranks, but they were also spilling away from our ridiculous battle and out into the streets that surrounded us, taking eager hold of the human population that I hadn’t even noticed had been cowering behind whatever cover they could find in the area.

  I’m not sure why the non-magical people nearby had felt that was a good idea—perhaps because we’d been very clearly focused on our own little battle and hadn’t been making a point of ransacking the city or anything. People like a spectacle, and we sure as shit counted as one. Maybe they thought we were making a movie.

  They were learning the price of that choice now, though, as the demons spilled forth and made no attempts to organize their attacks. In fact, they seemed to be plowing into the streets with reckless abandon, grabbing humans and throwing them into waiting fanged maws, or just throwing them into the sides of buildings, where they landed with sickening cracks.

  ‘This is bad,” I said to no one.

  “No jodas,” replied Sol in her standard monotone.

  My relief at seeing her alive, in one piece, and well enough to make dark jokes was short lived. The demons just kept coming. The rip in the seam was as wide as the parking lot that it filled, and there were dozens more of them pouring through every second. We had to do something.

  If only I had the faintest clue what.

  “What do we do?” Seamus asked, appearing beside us and echoing my thoughts.

  And ok, I couldn’t help myself, I threw my arms around them both, unaware how much I’d missed them until they were both back in my sight again.

  “We fight,” Sol said, after a brief embrace, even though her face showed what a bleak prospect she thought that was.

  I nodded, and Seamus’ face paled, but his chin dipped with mine. What choice did we have? The demons were going to tear this place apart, and I didn’t know how on Earth we were going to stop them, but I was starting to think some dragon fire might be in order. Just because Thanatos could eat it, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t kill most of the demons who had just poured through that tear.

  So we stood, shoulder to shoulder, facing the horde of demons who had, for whatever reason, maybe because the
y’d been invited by MOME—that would be entirely like Dryer—or maybe just because they could, decided to take out Phoenix, and together, as though we shared an internal count, we pulled on our animal forms.

  And came out on the other side as something entirely new.

  ¿QUE DEMONIOS?

  Vic, Sol, WHAT THE HELLS IS GOING ON?

  Um…I have no clue, but we don’t really have time to—

  And then we were charging into the fray as one because… well, we were one.

  There was a horde of demons charging straight for us, so we didn’t have time to sort out why the fuck we’d just shifted and come out as a giant dragon body—as big as any of the adult dragons we’d seen in the dragon realms—with three fucking heads, only one of which was a dragon’s. The other two were, perhaps predictably—if you could ever predict turning into a giant, three-headed monster right out of someone’s nightmare mythology without meaning to—a wolf and a panther. But I didn’t even have time to process all of that before a few dozen demons reached us at the same time and started throwing various appendages and powers at us at once.

  We responded to that as you might expect a giant three-headed monster to respond.

  We burned the shit out of them.

  Turns out crazy-assed pseudo-chimera-Vic-Sol-Seamus could breathe dragon fire out of all three mouths.

  Fuck yeah!

  I wasn’t sure which one of us thought that. Maybe all three of us had. Because in addition to body slamming the front line of demons that had charged us, we’d just used all three of our heads to light up the majority of the ones that were still standing (as well as quite a few of the ones who’d gone down).

  We let out a roar that actually shook the pavement where we were standing, and shattered a few office building windows in the block around us.

  That was about when the demons decided to take us more seriously.

  At least, I assume that’s why a surge of demons all attempted to attack us at the same time.