Blood Rite

by E.J. Stevens

  I reached for my magic, trembling with relief to find it ready and waiting. Like the blades strapped to my forearm, and hidden inside my boot, it was a comfort to know that traveling through the portal hadn’t declawed me, so to speak. Having weapons meant that I had options. We had a chance to win this fight.

  I strode forward, Ceff at my side. Torn paced in front of us, a tiger hunting its prey. Forneus watched the swirling portal at our backs. I glanced at my friends, Jinx’s words echoing through my mind. We are stronger together.

  I just hoped that she was right.

  Chapter 31

  There were two ways to destroy a lich; fire and decapitation. With my wisp magic capable of walls of flame and fireballs, and Forneus’ demonic fire magic and his ability to summon hellfire, we’d thought that decision was simple. Torn and Ceff would help us fight through the zombies, clearing a path to the lich king and keeping the enemy distracted, while Forneus and I burned the necromancer to a cadaverous crisp.

  Too bad our magic couldn’t touch him.

  It didn’t keep us from trying. Even Ceff tried directing a small lasso of water at the lich king, willing to see if something other than fire magic would penetrate the lich’s shields, but the creature batted it away as if it were a fly. No, less that. At least an insect can bite and sting. Our magic couldn’t even do that.

  Cold fingers of dread slid up my spine as I realized the horror of our situation. We might all die here in this wasteland shrine to death. All of us might be destined to become the lich king’s playthings. Worse, we’d never get to see our loved ones again, but they might see us if the necromancer sent our zombified corpses after them.

  I couldn’t let that happen. There had to be a way to defeat the lich. I took a deep breath, surveying the surrounding deathscape, searching for a way to win this.

  The Necropolis was a world of ash and bone, but for a moment, I caught a whiff of bitter marsh grass. A grin tugged at my lips and I gave in to the smile, baring my teeth. I had my machete strapped to the small of my back, hidden beneath my jacket. It had come in handy on our visit to see Jenny Greenteeth. I’d used the machete to hack away the overgrown grasses and vines that had blocked our path. The blade was deadly sharp. If I could get within reach of the lich king, it just might take off his head.

  Decapitation it is. But how could I possibly make it through a horde of zombies?

  I ran, sprinting around zombie ogres and hurtling over headstones, but even with faerie speed and agility and grim determination, I wasn’t fast enough. The lich king was becoming more powerful by the second.

  Magic swirled around the lich king in concentric rings of power, and diving through those rings were my friends. Ceff, Torn, and Forneus were going to get themselves killed.

  The necromancer continued to repel water, fire, and hellfire. Our magic could not touch him, no matter how close we got. And the zombies were so thick here. We wouldn’t break their line, not even with Torn leaping into their ranks, slashing and clawing with gleeful abandon.

  Not in time.

  I blinked, a wild idea working its way to the surface. There was an option I hadn’t even considered, because I was still thinking like a human. In Harborsmouth, the human parts of the city anyway, that helped me blend in. But here in the hellscape of the Necropolis while facing down an immortal lich king, thinking like a human was a liability.

  The answer was simple.

  I hastily tore off my leather jacket, trying to ignore the unease churning in my gut. A cold sweat broke out all over my body, and it wasn’t from my wisp magic. The last time I drew on that kind of power and unfurled my wings, I hurt a friend, badly. It was no surprise that I was hesitant, but this was the only way I could think of to save my friends. To save Ceff.

  I closed my eyes and magic leapt to answer my call. It was surprisingly strong, stealing the breath from my lungs, but I ignored the drowning sensation, focusing and sending that magic between my shoulder blades.

  That’s when one more of the lich king’s secrets became apparent, the clues sliding into place to form a complete picture. The necromancer had stolen a piece of Dunn’s world, the land of the dead, a fact that I was sure the Celtic death god would be interested to hear.

  But it got weirder. The lich had managed to stitch edges of his Necropolis to the human world, such as the gates we’d discovered in London and in Harborsmouth, as well as to Faerie. And with the constant pulling of those threads, he’d pulled those worlds closer together.

  The lich king was a spider in the center of a web of power so great, I had no idea what would happen if we killed him. But we were about to find out.

  I reached for Faerie, knowing now why my wisp power leapt like a rodeo horse, bucking and kicking to be free. This was wild magic, faerie magic, and it was mine.

  Magic tore through me. Wings burst from my either side of my spine, slicing through my skin and tearing through my t-shirt, but not becoming tangled in it.

  Zombies swarmed over my friends, overwhelming them with sheer numbers. As I leapt, Ceff went down under a sea of zombies.

  Frantic, I took to the monochrome, ash-filled sky. I lost sight of Ceff, as even his head was swallowed beneath the lich king’s army. Torn was still bobbing up for air, but even with the wicked gleam in his eyes, I could see he was tiring, making his way to the surface less often.

  I pushed my wings, forcing my body to climb higher. From this vantage, I could see that Forneus was faring better than the others, keeping a small circle around himself burned clear with hellfire, but he wasn’t making forward progress. He couldn’t reach the lich king or our friends. There were too damned many of them, an endless raging sea of zombies, wave after wave of the animated dead.

  I knew what I had to do. I just hoped I wasn’t too late.

  I circled around the throne looming over it all. The lich king appeared to be focused on my friend’s struggles with his pet zombies, but I didn’t expect that to last. In fact, I’m pretty sure my luck was about to take a dragon-sized turn for the worst.

  I heard a flap of wings in the distance, and they certainly were not my own. No, these were like a clap of thunder on the horizon. The lich hadn’t noticed me, not yet, but the zombie dragon had.

  The dragon was far from my location, only now abandoning its post at the Harborsmouth gateway, but with those huge, leathery wings, it wouldn’t take the creature long to close the distance. I was out of time.

  I slid the machete from its holster where it had been strapped to my lower back, adjusting to its weight in my gloved hands. It wasn’t as well balanced as my throwing knives, but it was sharp.

  I reached a point over, and just behind, the lich king’s shoulder and I shot toward him, flattening my wings as I dove. I needed speed, and whatever shred of luck I had left.

  Wherever the lich king stabbed his skeletal finger, his army of zombies scuttled and stomped, trampling everything there to dust. Right now, he was pointing at my friends.

  I gritted my teeth, gripped the machete so hard my knuckles hurt, and struck. The blade hit just below the lich king’s chin. Pain jolted up my arms, but I didn’t let go of the machete. That might have been a mistake.

  My world spun, the jarring impact abruptly yanking me from the air. My wings tried to over-compensate and I felt a wrenching tear. But I held on to the machete, screaming as I kicked out at the throne, trying to gain the leverage I needed to sever through the ancient bone and steely tendons of the lich king’s neck.

  One booted foot caught on the necromancer’s robes, and with a crack of my knee hitting stone, I toppled to the ground. I wasn’t the only thing to topple.

  I sucked air into bruised lungs, pawing at the ground, trying to crawl away from the necromancer’s throne and put distance between me and the skull that rolled beside me.

  It wasn’t one of the moldering skulls that dotted the landscape, or a stone Memento Mori broken away from the throne. This skull was the head of our enemy. My mouth fell open and I stared incre
dulously.

  The lich king was dead.

  Chapter 32

  You’d think that killing a lich king would grant me a breather. For just a moment, I thought it had. Weapons clattered to the ground, followed by the heavy, echoing thud of corpses. The zombies stopped fighting and dropped as if they were marionettes and the lich king’s death had cut their strings.

  I scanned the bizarre battleground, searching for my friends and for my beloved. Torn scowled, disappointed that the zombies had stopped fighting, and Forneus extinguished his ring of fire. They were safe.

  I stumbled over the lich king’s headless body toward where I’d last seen Ceff, halting breathless as he stood and turned to me. I felt a frisson of heat as our eyes met, but it didn’t last. Good things never do.

  A huge shadow fell over the battlefield, growing rapidly. My stomach clenched as realization dawned. Oh, Oberon’s eyes on a stick.

  “Run!” I screamed, waving my friends toward the vacated throne that loomed to my right. The throne was the only potential shelter and its location on the hill was, as far as I could tell, just outside the falling zombie dragon’s trajectory. “Dragon!”

  Torn quirked an eyebrow, and I heard a muttered curse. I ran, ignoring the searing pain in my bruised and battered wings as the air dragged at them like claws. I had to hope that my friends would follow.

  Please, please, please don’t take them from me. Not now.

  A gust of hurricane force wind knocked me off my feet and I landed face down in a pile of ash. Too bad that wasn’t the only ash problem.

  I’m not sure what’s the velocity of a falling zombie dragon, but when it hits an ash-dusted battlefield, it creates a mushroom cloud of cremated dead people. The world went dark, and I’m humble enough to admit, I might have passed out. Sucking in a lungful of corpse ash was more than my battle-weary, bargain exhausted mind could handle.

  I came to, choking and coughing up soot and ash, but my friends were there. Ceff, Torn, and Forneus stood guard while I gasped for air and blinked gritty eyes.

  They were alive.

  I looked down at myself and back at my friends. We looked like chimney sweeps in a violent, twisted version of a Dickens story. I started to giggle.

  “You have a strange sense of humor, princess,” Torn said, shaking his head.

  That only made me laugh harder. I bent over, hands on my knees, tears streaming muddy rivers down my cheeks.

  “Did Miss Granger suffer a head injury?” Forneus asked.

  I couldn’t answer. I was too busy cackling like a Hollywood witch. I laughed out all the shock and horror, knowing that it was either succumb to convulsive laughter or uncontrollable sobbing.

  The lich king was dead. The zombies were no longer a threat. My body was a tumultuous storm of unwarranted fear, terrible puns, and unspent adrenaline. I just might let myself laugh forever.

  Too bad that’s when pain flooded my body, my veins turning to rivers of agony.

  Chapter 33

  We’d survived. I’d stopped giggling, my face itchy with ash and tears, and all the aches and bruises from our battle with the lich king and his zombies were making themselves known.

  “Mab’s bones,” I muttered.

  I placed a gloved hand on my lower back, working out the kinks. At least, I tried to rub at my sore muscles, right up until I brushed past one of my injured wings.

  “Oberon’s eyes, I’m dying,” I moaned.

  “You’re not dying, princess,” Torn said. “But you do look terrible.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, scowling.

  “You will feel better once you are able to put your wings away,” Ceff said. “And once we have returned home.”

  Home. That one word was like a shot of espresso. I couldn’t wait to go home and hug my kid and take a hot shower. Maybe not in that order. I was covered in the ashes of dead people.

  I shuddered, causing a new stab of pain to shoot through my wings.

  “I just need to grab my things,” I said.

  I used my booted foot to sift through the ashes at the base of the throne, the place where I assume I’d dropped my machete. The moments of the lich king’s decapitation and zombie dragon falling from the sky were a bit of a blur.

  I was almost ready to give up the search for my blade when I checked behind the mammoth throne. There, in the shadow behind the towering carved skulls, was a creature huddled in chains.

  I approached cautiously, my careful tiptoeing through the ashes attracting the attention of my companions.

  “Is that a unicorn?” I asked.

  “That is a night-mare,” Torn said, tilting his head to the side. “Curious finding it here.”

  “He’s not that bad,” I said, hands on my hips. I probably looked like a nightmare about now too. “I think he’s kind of cute.”

  The little horse-like creature was cute in a stabby sort of way. His fur was dark and wavy like a goat’s, where it wasn’t matted together, and his pointy horn twisted in a black and silver spiral, but his eyes were midnight blue and filled with stars. There were galaxies in those eyes.

  I yawned, swaying on my feet.

  “I don’t mean he’s a bad dream, or ugly, or a hot mess,” Torn said, snapping me out of it. Oberon’s eyes, I was tired. “A night-mare is a type of faerie.”

  “They’re rare, thank Lucifer,” Forneus said, fidgeting with his gloves.

  The night-mare, a creature so monstrous it made a demon lord nervous, bleated pathetically and farted.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “The lich king chained the night-mare here, enslaving it,” Ceff said, the threat of violence in his voice. He was angry and deadly serious. “Then starved her, feeding it only the most rotten, vile, twisted parts of himself.”

  I swallowed hard. That didn’t sound good.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Like, he fed her literal chunks of lich corpse?”

  No wonder the poor thing had indigestion.

  “Night-mares feed on dreams and on the fear that those dreams inspire,” Forneus said.

  Torn waved a hand at the expanse of graves and mausoleums.

  “The dead don’t dream,” he said.

  “And?” I asked.

  “Nightmares feed off dreams, good or bad,” Ceff said.

  “Mostly bad,” Forneus muttered.

  “But the only dreams here in the Necropolis were those of the lich king,” Ceff said, ignoring Forneus.

  I knelt down and smiled at the night-mare.

  “Yeah, those would give me indigestion too, sweetie,” I said, keeping my voice gentle.

  She didn’t flinch away or show her teeth. That was a good sign.

  Leaning in for a closer look made the horrors of the creature’s captivity even more apparent. Her fur was filthy and matted, and there were patches where her dark fur had started to fall out. My hands fisted at my sides and I fought down a shuddering sob.

  “You are not thinking of bringing her home,” Forneus said.

  “She’ll starve if we leave her here,” I said.

  “She smells like troll farts,” Torn said, wrinkling his nose.

  I shrugged. I was getting used to troll farts. That was the downside of pizza night with Marvin. Plus, I’d smelled worse. I lived with a baby demon who had a recent bout of noxious stomach distress due to a group of sorcerers. Sparky was better now, and we’d made the cloaked cabal pay, but I was a hero. I couldn’t see someone in distress and just walk away.

  “I’m not leaving her here to starve,” I said.

  I also wasn’t going to leave her all alone. I took in a deep, shaky breath and crouched down to offer the night-mare my gloved hand. The fact that I was wearing my leather gloves meant that I should be protected from psychic visions, but I wasn’t sure how a night-mare’s magic worked. And, right now, it didn’t matter.

  I knew what it was like to be different. To be feared. To be lonely. So, I reached out and when she didn’t shy away, I stroked he
r filthy, matted coat of fur.

  “Who’s a pretty, pretty girl?” I cooed.

  And she was a pretty girl, because the most beautiful thing in that moment was the boundless love shining in her star-filled eyes.

  “You know, the mare might be useful,” Forneus said.

  “How?” I asked, instantly suspicious.

  “Night-mares can feed off any dreams, but their preferred food is their namesake,” he said.

  “She can give our enemies nightmares?” I asked.

  I wasn’t rescuing the little sweetheart just to turn her into a weapon. If she wanted to help, sure. But I wasn’t using her like that. She’d been a slave long enough.

  “She can draw away the horrors that haunt your friend’s mind,” Forneus said.

  “Wait, what?” I asked.

  Then his words sunk in. Kaye. My friend still lay comatose in a witch facility outside the city. I would do almost anything to help her regain consciousness. Could the night-mare draw away the painful memories and growing fear that kept Kaye trapped inside her own mind?

  “If she can help us, I’ll ask her nicely once she’s healthy,” I said. “After I take her home.”

  Ceff nodded.

  “You would never have left her here and neither would I,” he said, gaze shifting from Forneus to Torn as if itching for a fight.

  I knew where the anger, and the protective instinct, came from. Ceff had been enslaved more than once. He also had a paternal streak a mile long.

  “You’re coming home with me little buddy,” I said. “You got a name?”

  The nightmare nudged the chain and I noticed a medallion similar to a pet ID tag hanging there. Etched into the medallion was a name.

  “Fernvolg?” I asked.

  The night-mare nodded her head with a whinny and a snort. She reminded me so much of Galliel it was making me homesick.

  “Okay, Fernie,” I said. “I’m sure we can find a nice place for you in the gardens with Marvin and Hob, or maybe in the church with Galliel. Until then, you can bunk in our office. We can use one of Sparky’s old beds and some blankets for a nest and you can eat all the dreams you want.”