by Eric Asher
The flap of the tent flung open, and armored boots crashed against the earth. Edgar turned to find Drake, covered in blood he suspected was not his own.
The Demon Sword offered a savage grin. “So it is Damian? It doesn’t much matter now. Your map’s wrong. Nudd’s army is marching on our camp as we speak. They circled north outside the wall, apparently skirting the edge of the spell that gives life to the map. Appalachia is engaging them in pockets, but there’s no way the green men can stop them all. They’ll be here in short order.”
Edgar glanced at Morrigan. “Will the shield stop them?”
The old crone changed, the lines of her skin softening and the steel of her eyes hardening. “Any shield can be broken. And I fear this is no different. Sound the call. It is time for the Obsidian Inn to heed it.”
Edgar turned his attention to Drake. “Vicky is here with the ghost, Terrence, and the death bat, Luna. They’re near the outskirts of the wall close to the colossus.”
Drake glanced at Morrigan and then back to Edgar. “She is well-suited to take care of herself. I would fight beside her above a great many of our own soldiers.”
“She’s too closely tied to Damian,” Edgar said. “She may hesitate at a critical moment and get herself killed.”
Drake scoffed at that. “If there is one thing that child does not do, it’s hesitate.”
“I’ll go,” Foster said.
Drake eyed Foster, as though pondering what the other fairy had said. “I’ll check in as the battle allows.” He looked to Morrigan. “Consider sending Aeros with them? If Nudd does something unexpected, Aeros can handle most anything.”
Morrigan inclined her head. “So be it. If Appalachia’s forces are engaged to the north, it does not leave Nudd many alternate routes.”
“He could move his forces through the Warded Ways.” Edgar tapped on the map behind the encampment. “He could come behind us easily enough.”
Morrigan gave one sharp shake of her head. “Not in force. In some small number, and perhaps some of his best assassins, but we have more than enough eyes on the Warded Ways.”
Edgar crossed his arms. “I’ll come with you to the front, Morrigan. It is long past time for this conflict to end.”
Edgar hadn’t seen Morrigan give a signal of any kind, but the deep horns of the Obsidian Inn boomed across the battlefield. The small tent city exploded into action. The cries of owl knights circling above the camp joined the rhythmic thump of boots on the ground.
Morrigan looked around the group. “May this be the last battle of Falias.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vicky stared. A cold electric chill of horror ran down her spine. Shadows had gathered along the top of the remaining walls of Falias, like a series of cloaked and helmeted gargoyles. Only Vicky knew they were nothing so benign as a gargoyle. The dark-touched had resurfaced, and they were here in force.
For a moment, she worried they were going to attack Damian, but as the seconds and then minutes ticked by, she realized they were waiting. And perhaps that in itself was why her heart felt like it might stop at any moment.
The colossus pulled itself up to a knee and reached out with one hand, leveraging itself onto the wall of Falias, sending the dark-touched vampires scattering. But even as that small group of vampires tried to run, the black cloak of the colossus’s power snapped out to swallow them.
What had been some ten dark-touched vampires vanished into shadow. The cloak started to expand and then collapsed. A moment later the colossus fell back to one knee and slammed into the wall once again.
The colossus didn’t still this time. Its fingers twitched, and its skin writhed like restless gravemakers. The shadowy veil of the cloak flowed away from the colossus, rising above it as those terrible skeletons and mounted horsemen exploded from the darkness.
Terrence cursed and took a step forward, rifle clutched in his hands.
But within two steps, every skeleton that had come from the shadows fell to the earth motionless, as dead as surely as the fallen leaves.
“What’s happening?” Luna squinted, her ears twitching like mad.
“I think he’s fighting it.” It was a happy thought, but there was a much darker thought Vicky didn’t speak aloud. He might not be winning.
The moment that sentence crossed her mind, a golden light etched its way through the cracks in the colossus. And its entire form vanished.
Vicky couldn’t stop the sobbing gasp that escaped her throat. This was what they had been working for. This was supposed to be how Damian came back to himself. But now Gaia had returned him, only to have him vanish once more.
A terrible weight settled into her chest, a kind of hopelessness she hadn’t felt in a very long time. A flicker of anger tried to cut through it, but nothing could change the empty sight of what stood before them. Damian was gone, and they had no way to find him.
Luna’s claws dug into her arm. “Something’s coming.” Her ears swiveled and then locked onto something to the left.
Vicky dragged her attention away from the ruined wall where Damian had been. Three fairies glided through the air above the speeding form of a brown furball. Huge black eyes stayed focused on Vicky no matter which way the furball rolled.
Foster pulled up just short of Vicky, hovering in the air in his small form. “Where’s Damian?”
Sparkles slammed into Vicky’s ankles, and she reached down to scratch the furball before she looked back to Foster.
“He disappeared. I don’t know what happened.”
Vicky understood the emotions that warred on Foster’s face. Disbelief turned to anger and concern until his expression pulled back into something like resignation.
Aideen laced her fingers in Foster’s and squeezed his hand.
Drake exploded into his larger form and dropped onto the ground from six feet in the air. “Save your mourning. If he vanished, he must have stepped into the Abyss. Unless you saw Gaia take him?”
Vicky shook her head.
“Then, for all we know, she successfully gave him her powers. For all we know, that was him stepping away from the battlefield, perhaps not wanting to harm you. We don’t know. Do not mourn for him yet.”
Foster studied the other Demon Sword, as if not quite believing that those words had come from Drake, come from the fairy who had once been their sworn enemy. But Vicky had been trying to tell them for months Drake wasn’t an enemy.
Whether or not Drake was right, Zola needed to know. Vicky pulled out her phone and sent the old Cajun a quick text.
Damian vanished. Not sure what happened. Just gone.
Zola didn’t respond, and Vicky figured she was tied up with other issues.
Luna stepped around Terrence until she was closer to Aideen. “The dark-touched vampires are here. The colossus took some of them off the wall, and the others vanished back into the city.”
“They probably didn’t go far.” Foster looked toward the fallen wall. A huge swath of it had been torn out. “We could march half the Obsidian Inn through that wall.”
Aideen pointed toward the sky. A squadron of owl knights soared overhead. “I’m fairly certain Morrigan has the same idea.”
Drake nodded. “Nudd will keep a circle of Unseelie Fae close by. I wouldn’t be surprised if he is guarded by dark-touched, as well. Come on, furball. We might as well kill some Unseelie while this battle unfolds.”
Sparkles exploded into her full-size form. Drake mounted the dragon and looked back to the others. “Stay on the outside of the battle if you can. Nudd is a cunning bastard. This is going to get bloody.”
With that, he took to the air and soared up into the ranks of the owl knights.
Terrence adjusted his grip on his rifle. “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m not one to sit outside a fight.”
Foster unsheathed his sword and ran his eyes from the tip of the blade down to the hilt.
Aideen drew her own blades and flashed into her Proelium state. “Agreed. My patience gro
ws thin.”
“Then I have very good news,” Luna said, looking toward the sky as her ears locked onto something Vicky couldn’t see.
The cloud above them broke open, and a serpent formed of something like exposed muscle, blood, and bone shot toward them like a lightning bolt. It was at least the width of Drake’s dragon, and twice as long.
“What the fuck is that?” were all the words Vicky could get out before the thing was on them.
It might have looked like a dragon without skin, glistening with a layer of blood, but it moved like the gravemakers, only faster. It hit the ground and claws extended as the thing swiped at Luna. The death bat barely had time to duck, but she stretched her wing out and scythed up through the bulk of the thing’s arm.
Vicky summoned twin soulswords as she watched in fascinated horror. The clawed paw fell away and tendrils of something blood-red shot forward and grabbed the severed limb, pulling the beast back together as it spun, catching Luna with a brutal whip from its tail.
The strike took the death bat off her feet and slammed her into the ground. She didn’t make a sound, and the silence terrified Vicky.
The fairies scattered, taking to the air as Drake’s dragon rocketed toward the clouds. Terrence leveled his rifle and took two quick shots at their attacker’s head. To Vicky’s surprise, chunks of bone and blood and something like muscle exploded from the bony ridges near the thing’s black eyes.
The attacking dragon recoiled, backpedaling as if shocked that it had been injured. No strands of blood reached out to grab the parts that had fallen off of the thing’s head.
Even so, Vicky didn’t think the dragon seemed injured. Surprised yes, but still whole.
“What the fuck is this thing?” Vicky slashed at the dragon’s tail as it spun around, apparently having thrown off the surprise of Terrence’s attack.
“Blood dragon!” Drake’s voice shouted from above them.
“An Unseelie beast,” Aideen said as she dropped like a guillotine. Her sword cut through the flank of the dragon, without removing any flesh, and the beast limped. It didn’t snap itself back together as it had when its claws had been severed entirely.
Drake followed her down, riding on the back of Sparkles. And where Aideen had cut, Drake’s dragon unleashed a torrent of fire. Terrence fired again, peppering the dragon’s flank with bloody holes that didn’t mend. But the rifle wasn’t strong enough to cut deep, and it would take hours for the ghost’s shots to do significant harm.
The blood dragon took to the air as Drake circled back around, and Vicky saw her opportunity to grab Luna and drag her back toward the tree line. The death bat’s ears twitched, but it was the only sign of life. It would have to be enough for now, and Vicky only hoped Luna would be safe in the woods.
Something squealed in the air behind them, and Vicky turned to see Sparkles spiraling toward the earth before she crashed into an awkward heap. Vicky heard Drake scream her name, and as she looked up toward the fairy, she saw the shadow of the blood dragon.
Luna wasn’t going to be safe by the trees. And neither was Vicky.
The blood dragon’s jaws unhinged and the terrible light of the dragon’s fire kindled in its throat.
She raised a shield, doubtful that would be enough, but there was nowhere to run. She’d taken her eyes off the dragon for only a moment, and managed to trap herself in the process.
A torrent of flame some fifteen feet wide erupted from the dragon’s mouth, but the earth rose to meet it.
Vicky had never seen an avalanche in person, didn’t know what it would sound like as a mountain came down to crush everything around it. But she imagined it was much like the scream Aeros released as he raised a wall of stone and dirt.
The Old God shot into the air as if fired from a great cannon, stony fists laced together like a wrecking ball above his head. The wall of rock fell away as the dragon’s fire dissipated and Aeros found his mark.
A sickening crunch sounded across the field as the crown of the dragon’s head collapsed, broken by the stone hammer of an angry god. It tried to run, but Aeros’s hand slid into the fractured eye socket of the beast, locking it in place as he fell upon it with a fury.
Nothing so large should move so fast, but as quick as the Old God rained one blow onto the beast’s skull, a second fell behind it until the blood dragon’s head was nothing but a pool of gore.
And even then, Aeros’s fury did not end. He tore the shattered skull away and flung it into the tree line where it rolled to a stop not twenty feet from Vicky and Luna.
The Old God turned to Vicky as the fairies returned to the earth around him. “Nudd is coming.” His eye lights flashed a brilliant yellow-green. “Whatever you have held back, the time for restraint has passed.”
“It’s not dead,” Drake said, sinking a boot into the blood dragon’s flank.
Vicky stalked toward the beast, the words of the Old God echoing in her head as she closed on the dragon. Soulswords sprang from either hand before the searing heat of hellfire rose from the ground, licking up her boots until the blades became soulfire. She plunged the white-hot power into the dragon’s chest.
It didn’t fight back, decapitated as it was, but she felt the flesh tremble as she cut through bone and blood and gristle, turning things out to the light that should have remained in the darkness inside the beast.
Aideen hopped onto the edge of the wound, her voice an eerie calm. “Find the heart.”
And so Vicky dug deeper into the beast as blood and fleshed sizzled around her and Aeros snapped ribs away. What felt like an eternity later, her limbs shaking from the power of the soulfire, Vicky found the heart. It burst like a fragile balloon at the touch of her power, and the blood dragon’s body stilled.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sudden buzz in her cloak sent a jolt of panic down Zola’s spine. Her eyes flashed down to her waist to assess the damage, to see what had breached her defenses. When it buzzed again, it took her attention away from the roasted corpse of a green man.
“Fuck,” she spat, realizing it had just been the vibration of her phone. She started to ignore it, but with the lull in the battle around her, she lifted it from her pocket. It only took a moment to read Vicky’s message.
“Fuck.”
The piercing cries of another Eldritch thing being pummeled by green men drew her gaze away from the phone. Zola’s lips pulled up into a terrible smile when she saw the tentacles go limp and slam into the shallow river.
She sent a text to Nixie, and hoped it was the right thing to do.
But Zola didn’t have time to worry as that shallow river retreated from the shore like someone had dumped it out. Fish flopped around the green men while a rainbow shimmered across the waters, and a creature out of nightmare dripped into their world.
It had eyes, too many eyes, and legs to carry it forward. Each leg looked vaguely human, but they made no sense, sprawling in every direction, pulling the formless mass toward whatever prey it could. Hundreds of mouths gaped wide, with all-too-human teeth as if to bite at their nearest threat.
But it didn’t need to bite. It simply touched a green man, and he decayed like a fallen log, rot overcoming his body as his scream weakened, cut off, and he vanished into the Eldritch thing.
“Mine!” Beth snarled as she slid a blade across her forearm. One of the Shadowed Land creatures materialized and did not hesitate to fall upon their foe.
Its fists crashed into the Eldritch thing, but Zola recoiled in horror as the creature’s amorphous mass of eyes and limbs surged forward like a tidal wave, sweeping over the towering shadow.
Beth screamed as the shadow dissolved, and Zola watched helplessly as the blood running from the blood mage’s arm turned black and she collapsed.
“Dominic!” Sam screeched, knocking the enforcer out of the way as a flank of the creature closed on him. Both vampires escaped as Ashley split a series of tiles with her nine tails, sending a cloud of blackness into the Eldritch thing.
>
It was the first attack that had any effect. One moment tendrils of that awful blob were surging at Sam and Dominic, and the next they were gone.
Zola stepped forward as the green men retreated at Stump’s order. They understood well enough they were outmatched.
She held her cane out and spoke. “Tyranno Eversiotto!”
Lightning arced out across the battlefield, destroying the earth in front of her as it carved its way through the riverbed, and sank deep into the Eldritch thing. Every mouth on its body opened, and a sound not meant for mortal ears screeched through the air.
The blob curled up on itself, and then Zola understood what a terrible mistake she’d made.
It expanded like a bomb, devouring everything it touched. Green men died instantly. Unseelie Fae on the opposite shore fell as surely as their allies.
“Magnus Glaciatto!” Ice stormed down onto the Eldritch thing, and some small relief found its way into Zola’s chest as more and more power pummeled the damned thing.
But it wasn’t enough.
A wave closed over Sam and Dominic.
“No!” Zola screamed as her heart stuttered.
A shadow barreled under the wave of the Eldritch thing, expelling Sam and Dominic before they were struck. The shadow was Vik, and Zola cried out as the vampire screamed.
He hadn’t come through untouched. His arm dissolved as he started to succumb. The snap of a willow branch severed the limb at the shoulder, leaving the arm to bubble and vanish into the chaos at the river.
“Get him out of here!” Sam yelled, pulling on Vik’s remaining arm as Dominic lifted them both and sprinted away from the blob.
“Fall back to the mansion,” Stump ordered as the Eldritch thing pulled itself back together.
In one terrible moment, the legs of that blob worked in unison, and it sped across the ground. Ashley turned away, cradling Beth as the beast closed on them. She leaned her forehead against Beth’s.
“I’m sorry.”
The sky opened in a storm of brilliant red lightning. And a Titan fell.