by Eric Asher
Hugh panted, cringing at the wounded foot even as his bones tried to knit themselves back together. He needed rest and meat, and he needed to figure out why in the ever-loving hell the flying heads and the serpents had appeared in Kansas City.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rapid healing was a blessing, but it didn’t make the wounds hurt any less. Some werewolves were better at healing than others, as if they were preprogrammed to put themselves back together, aligning bones and fractures the same way their bodies would shift if they were undergoing the change. Hugh had always been one of the lucky ones, but sweat rolled down his face as he grimaced in pain. The strain pushed him deeper into the leather couch cushions.
Splitlog stayed nearby, frowning at the older wolf. His worry was plain to see, but as the bones shifted in Hugh’s foot, he didn’t have reassuring words to give. Hugh grunted in pain as bone and muscle shifted and clicked like the crack of a dozen knuckles.
“He’ll be all right,” Alan said. “I’ve seen him heal through far worse than that.”
“But if the bones heal wrong…” Splitlog said.
“They won’t,” Alan said. “At least I’ve never seen them do that. Hugh has a gift for healing.”
“For healing himself, anyway,” Haka said before pausing. His words were hurried. “That didn’t come out right.”
Hugh frowned at him.
The screams of the flying heads were muted inside the lair beneath the brewery, but there was no mistaking them now. Hugh stared up at the smooth ceiling and gritted his teeth against the pain as one of the larger bones in his ankle snapped back into place. The foot looked better now, not so much mulch as just a badly bruised foot. The worst of it would be over soon, but that still left them trapped in the lair.
“What the hell are they?” Alan asked. “Hugh told us a story once, something about giants?”
“Something about giants?” Splitlog said, repeating the question slowly.
Hugh let out a slow laugh as he glanced at Alan. “I did, but some of them have been preoccupied in recent months. We have not had much peace. It is easy to let the stories slip your mind when there are more immediate threats.”
Haka grunted. “They seem pretty immediate now. Hugh’s told you this story before, but I’ll tell you again. The heads belonged to giants who once lived in the rivers. They were no friend of the Wyandots here. Men and women would sail their canoes across the river, only to be dragged into the depths by a giant’s hand. One did not survive an encounter with those monsters on the water.
“But some of the Wyandots were great hunters, and knew that if you could not slay an enemy on their own terrain, you needed only lure it to another. And so they did, and they slew the giants of the river, severing their heads to bring an end to the beasts.
“Once the bodies were dumped back in the waters, and the heads left to sink into the depths, the giants changed. Their bodies became serpents that dwell in rivers to this day, but it was the heads that grew wings and continued their hunger for the flesh of the Wyandot.”
“Right,” Alan said. “That’s coming back to me now. And they got bigger?”
“Large enough to devour a man in one bite,” Splitlog said. “As you’ve seen.”
“Okay,” Alan said. “Right. What the fuck?”
“And what the hell are we going to do about those things?” Splitlog asked. “If Warpole and Marie Jeanne are going to be back anytime soon … if they walk into those things …”
“Call them,” Hugh said through gritted teeth.
“Dad,” Haka said. “Come on. I know you’re hurt, but you can think clearer than that. We already tried. They’re not answering.”
If they weren’t answering, they were either dead already, or Marie Jeanne, one of the only female wolves in the Kansas City Pack, had actually talked Warpole into going to the movies. Hugh hoped it was the second option, but a sinking feeling in his gut told him it might not be.
“We can try Camazotz,” Alan said.
Hugh shook his head as a crackle of pain flashed through his small toes. “It’s too close to sunrise. Even if he came, should the battle draw on longer than a few minutes, he could be lost.”
“I didn’t think he was as sensitive to the sun is the other vampires,” Alan said.
“He’s not,” Hugh said. “But his strength is an order of magnitude higher than the vampires we call friends. Should he lose half of his strength where the others lose three-quarters of theirs, he will be too far limited to fight something like that.” He punctuated the sentence by raising his head toward the ceiling.
“Maybe it’s time to bring the axe,” Haka said.
Splitlog laughed. “You still believe your father’s story about that? An axe that slayed a stone giant? And now it just hangs on the wall in your bedroom?”
“It’s in the wall safe behind it,” Haka said quietly.
Perhaps Haka was right. Perhaps it was time to reveal that they did have a weapon of great power. Not one from the old stories, of that Hugh was sure, but one that could live up to them. But the time felt wrong. Hugh frowned, and Haka must have taken it as a dismissal.
“Alexandra then,” Haka said. “Nixie said to contact her if we needed anything.”
“Haka,” Hugh said, his voice low and reassuring. “They’re too far out. We need help now. That leaves us with the blood mages, and the coven. The blood mages’—” His jaw snapped shut as his large toe twisted and snapped. He blew out a breath and continued. “The blood mages’ ties to the shadow places could awaken far darker things than what we face here.” As he spoke, he pulled a phone closer. “We need the priestess.” He tapped Ashley’s contact, and the phone rang.
CHAPTER SIX
Ashley was in the middle of a damn fine dream when a distant buzz sounded in her ear. She was at the beach with Elizabeth, Gwynn Ap Nudd was dead, and they no longer needed to hide what they were from the commoners.
But even as Elizabeth whispered sweet words into Ashley’s ear, and her lips brushed Ashley so gently, the buzzing grew louder, more insistent, until Ashley’s eyes finally flew open. There was no light in the room save for a sliver of sunrise out the corner of her window, and the bright screen of her phone. Irritation turned to concern when she saw it was Hugh.
Ashley rubbed at her face and said, “Hello?” Her voice was scratchy, but she thought she sounded fairly awake for not being awake at all.
“Ashley,” Hugh said. “There’s been an incident in the ruins. We’re trapped in the lair, surrounded by an ancient creature, a flying head.”
Clearly she wasn’t very alert yet, because she could have sworn Hugh had just said “flying head.” It was one of the old creatures in the tales Splitlog liked to tell around the campfire down in the old ruins. But if things like that had ever been real, they certainly hadn’t been sighted in recent history.
“Ashley?” Hugh asked.
“I’m here, I’m here. I just thought you said flying head.”
“Heads,” Hugh said. “Plural. There are at least three of them. We need your help.”
Ashley cursed under her breath. It would figure that while Elizabeth was off with Cornelius, the wolves would get themselves into a world of shit. None of her friends seemed to have good timing when it came to asking for help.
“It’s just me,” Ashley said. “Elizabeth and Cornelius are almost an hour and a half away in Columbia. Unless you can wait that long for them to return?”
“I’m afraid not,” Hugh said as something boomed and thundered in the background, crackling through the phone. “They can’t reach us directly in the lair, but much longer and I fear they may bring the entire structure down on top of us. Even a werewolf can suffocate.”
“How do I kill them?” Ashley asked. There was a time she might have asked how to chase them away, protect them if they were such rare creatures, but the days of softness had long since left the priestess.
“We’re not sure if you can,” Splitlog said, raising his voice f
ar louder than he needed to for the speakerphone. “We did injure one, and it retreated, but we did not manage to kill any of them.”
Ashley grunted and swung her legs out of bed, struggling into the black leathers that let her merge into the shadows. She fastened her nine tails to the belt along with satchels for tiles and dragon scales. “We’ll see about that.”
“It would be appreciated if the ruins remained intact,” Hugh said. “There is a great deal of history here we should preserve as best we can.”
“You do like to complicate things, don’t you?” Ashley asked as she tucked her phone between her shoulder and ear and started buttoning her vest. “I guess it’s a good thing you had me rent this place right off 27th.”
“Thank you,” Hugh said. “Do not let them catch you. Their jaws are mighty, and they can devour you in a single bite.”
“I remember your stories. I’ll be there in ten. Don’t die.”
Ashley ended the call and reached for her boots. She knew the coven would be safe in the house they were staying in, but it still made her uncomfortable knowing how close her family was to the chaos unfolding in the ruins.
* * *
Ashley was out the door of the rental property a minute later, bracing herself against the cool drizzle in the air, while she spun a tile between her fingers. At the top of the hill waited the overlook. From there she’d be able to see down the hill into the ruins of the old city of Quindaro. Most were hidden behind trees and overgrown, but the place had come to feel like a second home of late with the werewolves.
She was almost to the overlook of the Quindaro ruins when her phone buzzed. Ashley felt through her vest for the switch that would silence the phone, but then she wondered if it might be Hugh again and checked it.
The buzz she’d silenced hadn’t been a call, but a text. She didn’t recognize the number, but that fact slipped her mind when she read the message.
We lost Damian.
Ashley’s heart pounded in her chest. Could be a wrong number, it could be a different Damian, maybe lost didn’t mean lost. Maybe they meant something else. Her breathing came in a rapid staccato as a horrible dread settled in her stomach. Now was not the time. Now their friends needed help. She marched toward the creatures assaulting Hugh and the wolves.
She stepped under the shelter of the overlook and leaned in against the stones that framed the word Quindaro. Her focus was off. She was going to get herself killed. It didn’t matter if it was a wrong number. She needed to set it straight. She’d already called the number back and raised the phone to her ear before she could think more about it.
“What happened?” Ashley blurted out soon as she heard the line pick up.
“It went bad,” a voice said. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Foster?” Ashley asked. “Whose phone are you on?” He didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. What mattered was what he had to say. “What happened?”
The story the fairy told her cut her to the bone. They’d found out where the nukes went, where Nudd had stashed them, but the battle hadn’t gone well. They’d lost allies, and in the end, Damian had lost himself. And if that wasn’t madness enough, Vicky had dragged him into the Abyss with Gaia, sparing the other Fae and commoners from the wrath of the mantle.
“Fucking hell.” Ashley kicked a small rock across the ground where it bounced against a low stone wall.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Foster said. “If you can help, we need it. I’ll kill as many as I can. I’ll bathe in the blood of Nudd’s people, but I can’t kill them all, Ashley. I’m not that strong.”
“Maybe not, but you’re that crazy,” Ashley said. “Foster I don’t want to hang up on you at a time like this, but Hugh and the werewolves are under attack in Kansas City. Flying heads have them trapped, and I’m afraid if I don’t get there soon, they might not be getting out of this.”
“Then go,” Foster said.
“Are you coming?” Ashley asked.
“No, but you aren’t far from Rivercene. I’ll reach out to Stump see if the innkeeper can help.”
“With Gaia and Damian, Foster, I don’t know …” She took a deep breath. Help would be welcome, but it wouldn’t arrive in time. “Aideen with you?”
“She is.”
Good, that meant he wasn’t alone. He was far less likely to do something idiotic if his wife was there to help him keep a level head. To say Foster could be brash was a vast understatement. People were going to die, and a hell of a lot of them. “Be safe.”
“Don’t die.”
And with that, the line went dead.
Ashley pulled the nine tails off her belt after she stashed her phone in her vest. She muttered a string of curses as she started down the path on the other side of the overlook. It wasn’t a long walk to the brewery, but it felt as though it took hours. The closer she got, the more the earth seemed to shake and the trees closed in around her. Distant lightning turned every tree branch into a fiery shadow in the dim sunrise.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At first, she’d mistaken them for thunder, but as she slid through the woods, quiet as she could be on the bed of leaves and twigs, she caught sight of three of the massive heads crashing against the ground. It wasn’t thunder at all. It was monsters out of Splitlog’s stories. Stringy hair fell down the winged heads. A wingspan that could have been mistaken for a giant bat’s carried the heads into the air where they screeched and roared and crashed once more into the earth.
Hugh hadn’t been exaggerating. The heads were large enough that they could easily swallow a man, or crush him in their jaws. Loose stone and bricks toppled down the rounded hill. Ashley knew the lair sat beneath that mound. She needed to act, needed to buy them time to get out, and it was time to find out how much damage she could do to a flying head.
The years she’d spent practicing with the nine tails made the weapon feel more like an extension of her arm than a foreign object. And that fact meant missing was something she rarely did.
Ashley slid to the edge of the woods, close enough to smell the stench of rot and meat left in the open too long. Of all the scents she’d encountered on the battlefield, the flying heads were particularly pungent. She flicked the tile into the air, and it sailed harmlessly toward the nearest flying head until she pulled her arm back and released the nine tails.
The whip cracked, the tile shattered, and a black cloud of death barreled forward into the creature.
The blade of the stone was a long-forgotten art. One brought back to life by a concerned friend, a power she could wield to defend herself, her coven, and her friends. The black shadow of the lightning-lit cloud crashed into the flying head. Ashley had seen the magic eat away the metal of the car, and the flesh of more than one enemy. And while it did much the same to the creature, Ashley was horrified to see the cloud dissipate and the creature flailing on the earth.
The blade of the stone scoured flesh away from its face, but even though it was wounded to the bone, it took only a moment before it was in the air once more, its attention and the rage of that dark eye drawn to her.
“Shit,” she muttered, sprinting into the edge of the tree line.
But there were two more still slamming into the lair. She needed to hit them all, and then get the hell out of there.
If the darker cloud of the blade of the stone wasn’t going to kill these things, she might as well try the dragon scale. Her fingers slid into the second pouch, pulling out the dark gray scale with runes etched onto either side. She dodged the nearest flying head as she entered the clearing once more, flipped the scale into the air, and cracked the nine tails forward in an overhand strike.
The razor-like nine tails met the scale near the top of its arc, and nine torrents of flame rocketed forward. As fast as it had appeared, it vanished, but in its wake was the smoking ruin of grass and scorched trees that graced the ceiling of the ruins.
Her gambit worked. She’d drawn the attention of all three heads now. She sprinted
away, heading deeper into the woods, making as much noise as she could to be sure the heads stayed on her tail. Eventually, she came out of the other side, stumbled across the railroad tracks, and into the brightening sunrise.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hugh winced as he put all his weight on his healing foot. It wasn’t ideal, but it was tolerable. He could push through the pain without slowing the group down, though Splitlog eyed him suspiciously, and rightfully so.
The pounding above them stopped as a frisson of power buzzed down Hugh’s back. He couldn’t stop the shiver. If the receding crashes of the flying head hadn’t been enough of an indicator, someone was using strong magicks.
“Prepare yourselves. She’s opened the way for us.”
If the dark-touched had allied themselves with those old foes, it was a gamble that proved some level of desperation. The flying heads might attack the enemies of the dark-touched, but they’d devour the vampires who wandered too close just as quickly.
Hugh strode to his bedroom and frowned at the wall that held an old stone hatchet. He placed his palm against the head, and a ward flared to life, etching its way across the old blade in a sparking green light.
Splitlog liked to tell the story of Skunny Wundy, a hero who once wielded the hatchet sharpened on the tongue of a stone giant, and it seemed to give the wolf a kind of joy to say Hugh’s hatchet was one and the same. But Hugh knew the man who had forged the hatchet from stone, knew the head of it was a kind of magic long lost to the smiths and makers of the world. And he doubted very much it had been the weapon of the hero Skunny Wundy.
The rough outline of a rectangle glowed in the wall, and Hugh yanked on it. The hatchet swung forward, revealing a very similar weapon behind it, only this one was gray, and had long ago been forged with the tongue of a stone giant. Hugh hesitated, pondering once more that if the flying heads and serpents were there for the hatchet, it might not be the best idea to take it out of the warded safe. But the werewolves were in danger, and Ashley was risking her life. If there was a more opportune time to wield the weapon, Hugh couldn’t see it. He pulled the hatchet out of the safe with quick and careful reverence before hooking it into the leather loop on his belt.