by Eric Asher
Gaia frowned at the bear. “There is no battle left in St. Charles. I do not feel the stain of Nudd’s magic there.”
“Graybeard is there, and he is a channel to the Burning Lands. The ones who freed you fight and die in Falias, and the Mad King, the Fae who imprisoned you, is their adversary.”
Zola raised an eyebrow as a slow smile pulled up the corner of Gaia’s lips.
“I do not seek revenge, friend. I am whole. But I do not seek the death of those who freed me.” She turned to the others gathered in front of Rivercene. “If you would join us, gather close.”
“Oh fuck,” Zola muttered.
Vik climbed to his feet, supported by Dominic.
“My lord, please. You must rest.” Dominic pleaded with Vik, but the vampire lord was having none of it.
Zola snapped at the pair before Sam could intervene. “Vik, sit your ass down. Ah’m not burying you today. Dominic, sit on him if you have to.”
Vik blinked at the old Cajun. “You do not have to be so rude about it.” He sank back onto the grass and leaned against Whip’s leg. “Perhaps a short rest would not be so bad.”
“You can join us once you grow that arm back,” Zola said.
“We cannot regenerate limbs in full, Adannaya.”
“Ah know.”
Gaia turned to Beth and Ashley. “The danger is not fully gone from this place. Will you guard it with the coven?”
“Of course.” Ashley inclined her head. “We will await your return. And Beth could use the rest.”
Beth grimaced at Ashley before glancing down at the remnants of the black blood smeared across her forearms. “Maybe I could rest a few with Vik.”
“Come on, furball.” Sam scratched Jasper between the eyes and stepped closer to Gaia before the world vanished.
* * *
When the world resolved around them, Sam found herself face to face with Death’s Door. She glanced back at the motley crew who’d come with Gaia. “Wait here,” she said before stepping inside, the familiar bell sounding as she made her way down an aisle filled with feathers, mortar and pestles, and a variety of knickknacks.
A riotous flurry of booming barks echoed up from the back room before Bubbles and Peanut exploded through the saloon-style doors. They leapt at Sam, who caught the two as best she could while they covered her in tongues and slobber.
The doors swung open again, and between tufts of green fur and pink tongues, Sam caught sight of Frank.
“Sam?” His face split into a grin, and he hurried over to her, pushing Bubbles out of the way, much to the cu sith’s irritation.
She kissed him, hard, before pulling away. “We’re going to Falias.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
Sam smiled. “Yes, you are. Get your cannon. We’re going to need it.”
“The bomb lances are all on the Bone Sails.”
“Perfect.” She looked down at the cu siths. “Who wants to go for a walky-walk and eat some bad fairies?”
Bubbles and Peanut howled at the idea, bouncing up and down as they followed Sam and Frank out of Death’s Door.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nudd’s attacks grew more ferocious with every passing minute. Vicky watched a wide curved arc of gray light scythe across the battlefield and slam into Edgar. The flaming armor he wore went out like a light as he fell to the earth.
Morrigan spun the sword in her hand like it was an old, unconscious gesture before she lashed out at Nudd again and again. Every shield he raised, she shattered, but her attacks lost too much momentum to do any real damage to the Mad King himself.
At last, Nudd slipped between Morrigan’s defenses, and though Vicky couldn’t hear her cry out, she collapsed as an axe found her thigh. Nudd moved in for a death blow, but Morrigan rolled to the side and hit him with a spiral of black power that broke apart into a mass of crows, flinging him back into the wall.
Edgar climbed back to his knees before his armor reignited and he shot into the air once more.
Nudd grinned as he regained his feet, pulling off his split and crushed helmet with some effort. Every word he spoke grew in volume. “Arise!” Nudd’s voice boomed across the roar of the battlefield, and the air shimmered behind him.
“Oh my god,” Terrence whispered as the crowns of three usurpers breached the tops of the walls around Falias. Thick tentacles stretched forward, pulling bulbous domes along like standing jellyfish.
There was no safety around the Eldritch. Dark-touched and Unseelie and Vicky’s own allies fell at a touch from the things.
Edgar, fast as he was, grunted as a tentacle slammed into his back and he crashed to the earth not ten feet from Vicky. His armor sizzled on his still form, and Vicky risked turning him over.
He blinked and gasped for breath, but he wasn’t dissolved like so many others in the battle.
Edgar’s voice shook when he spoke, still short on air. “I don’t think we can kill them, kid.”
Vicky wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him he was wrong, but he wasn’t. The nearest usurper wrapped Aeros up in its tentacles, and when the Old God didn’t serve as food, it tossed him through the air like a tennis ball.
There was a hopelessness blooming in Vicky’s chest, and its presence raised a fury in her heart, one that called to her abandoned destiny. She knew she’d risk the soulfire again, strike out at a usurper even if she didn’t believe the magic strong enough to take down an Eldritch beast. But a light between worlds flickered, and Vicky took a hesitant step back, not knowing what was coming.
The world before the usurpers shimmered once more. And through it came the long broken prow of an impossible ship. Through that portal came the Bone Sails with Gaia at the bow. Her golden hair flickering in the smoke of the battle.
There were no rivers there in Falias, but the Bone Sails didn’t need water. It only needed the ghost of a lake that had come before or the trickle of a creek that had once been a mighty river.
Graybeard leaned into the ship’s wheel. “Fire!”
Tears pricked at Vicky’s eyes as the Bone Sails unleashed hell across Nudd’s forces. Sometimes she forgot, when her own hope wasn’t enough, her friends would be there.
But something more came through with the Bone Sails. A surge of power, an energy like she hadn’t felt since she stepped into the Burning Lands and tore down the Destroyer. The rush of strength was exhilarating, but what came next sent a bolt of terror down her spine.
The world shimmered again, and behind the Bone Sails, a colossus stepped into their world one last time.
“Damian could kill the usurpers!” Luna grabbed Vicky’s arm. “We might get out of this yet.”
But as they watched, the colossus glowed a brilliant gold and started falling apart. Chunks of gravemakers fell from a great height, splattering against the carnage below as the colossus fell to a knee.
Gravemakers rose of their own accord, siding with no one, and destroying every Fae they encountered. As the head of the colossus disintegrated, Vicky saw two forms, one standing, one flat on the ground.
The one who stood raised his arm and lit a soulsword. One quick slash sent the horned helmet of Hern spiraling across the earth.
“Damian,” Vicky whispered.
He stepped back into the gravemakers, and the field of dead vanished in a golden haze, only to reappear above a usurper moments later. A hail of gravemakers reached out to tear the Eldritch thing apart. But it did not die. It did not slow as the gravemakers carved deep into its flesh.
“That’s what we needed.” The voice was hoarse, and drew Vicky’s attention back to Edgar, coming up to his feet. The mage solis flared, his armor blinding as he took to the sky once more.
Edgar did not attack the usurper directly. He arced up and over the mass of gravemakers as they pulled the dome of the Eldritch thing in three different directions, splitting it down the middle. And it was that chasm, formed by the gravemakers unleashed by Damian, where Edgar made his move.
Vicky looked
away, and Luna squeaked while Terrence cursed when the skies turned to fire and the usurper ignited from within. Trails of flaming gravemakers continued to pull the body apart when Vicky opened her eyes again. The rubbery gray flesh grew bright, like a golden stained glass window lit up in a brilliant sunset. She couldn’t find Edgar, and for a moment, she feared they’d lost him, too.
But the charred and smeared armor of the Watcher took to the air once more, and that hollowness in Vicky’s chest kindled a light of hope.
“Dirge,” Terrence said, his voice almost reverent as the forest god leapt over the rails of the Bone Sails. He sank into the earth, crushing Unseelie Fae under his weight.
Terrence looked at Vicky. “I’m heading for Dirge. I’ll help that tree if I can.”
Vicky nodded. “Luna, get me to the Bone Sails.”
Luna flexed her wing, clearly testing the strength and damage she’d sustained in the fighting. Apparently satisfied after being healed by Aideen, she climbed up onto Vicky’s back, gently grabbed her waist with clawed feet, and took to the air.
From the sky, it was easy to tell that whatever the gravemakers and Edgar had done to the usurper had finally killed it. But that left two more, and Damian was nowhere to be seen. She doubted very much that without him anyone else could raise those gravemakers into the air.
“Ready?” Luna asked as she angled over the deck of the ship.
“Drop me.”
The death bat released Vicky, and she fell to the deck, bouncing off the fleshy sinew that formed the surface of much of the Bone Sails. She righted herself, and her face met a very enthusiastic gray furball.
By the time she peeled the reaper away, Sam was standing next to them. Behind her, Frank fired bomb lances over the rail, sending groups of Fae into oblivion while Graybeard’s crew sent fiery rounds into the dark-touched.
“Welcome aboard, lass,” Graybeard shouted.
Sam held her hand out and pulled Vicky to her feet.
“Did you see him?”
Sam nodded. “But then he just vanished again.”
Zola stood near the stern, firing incantations into the ranks of Unseelie as she could, and raising shields to deflect any counterattacks.
A familiar voice, like one she’d only spoken to over a distance, sounded behind Vicky. “He stepped back into the Abyss. It would appear my powers did not kill him.”
Vicky looked up into the towering face of the Titan. She wasn’t the size of a mountain, but Vicky suspected she stood some nine feet in the air, and beside her was Alexandra. “Gaia.”
“Whole again. Thanks to you and our friends.” Gaia turned back to the bow, and golden light seeped out of her fingers into the structure of the Bone Sails. Vicky followed it as it traced lines into the cannons, and Graybeard’s crew fired again. “We will speak again, child, but for now, the battle calls.”
Alexandra added her power to Gaia’s as the cannons thundered across the battlefield.
Graybeard called out on the deck above them. “Those pups are mighty restless. You might be thinking of unleashing them, Samantha.”
Sam jogged up the stairs to join Graybeard by the wheel as Luna swooped down and landed on the railing. Vicky followed and found two enormous green fur balls glowing with crackles of gold lightning tracing down their tails.
The cu siths were huge. Vicky knew they could grow in battle, but Peanut’s head stood almost to her shoulder in their current state.
Sam crouched between the two, scratching them under their chins. “Go kill the snakes. Stay away from the big jellyfish.”
“Snakes?” Vicky asked, but she realized what Sam meant a moment later. One of the lamprey creatures was still alive, and closing on the Bone Sails with a cadre of Unseelie Fae. The shock of the ship’s arrival had worn off, and they had quickly become a target of Nudd’s forces.
The cu siths didn’t need any more coaxing than that. They erupted off the side of the Bone Sails, arcing down some twenty feet to the ground before sprinting at the lampreys, hitting the mass like wrecking balls.
It was a terrifying, relentless thing to behold. The howls and barks shook the very air around them before they dug their teeth in, thrashing lampreys to pieces even as the eel-like things bit back.
But any time the tatters of the lamprey beast managed to encase the cu siths, a ball of gory green fur exploded from the side, or the top, or simply flung a mountain of lampreys into the sky.
It never stood a chance.
The cu siths might have had the lampreys under control, but that did nothing for the Unseelie Fae closing in from above. A volley of arrows peppered the Bone Sails’ deck. Jasper burned half a volley to ash, and Sam swatted what she could out of the air, but several found their mark, shattering the bones of Graybeard’s crew. Gaia raised her arm and a shield sprang to life, drawing so much power from the ley lines that the hair on Vicky’s arms bristled.
Gaia swept her arm in a wide arc, and the shield burst outward, scattering fairies and owls in a pulse of energy.
Graybeard squawked, a high-pitched thing that was nearly a squeal. Vicky saw the fletching of an Unseelie arrow spiraling in the air where it had clipped the bird and pierced the skeleton’s back.
“Graybeard!” Sam sprinted at the captain and pulled him away from another volley of arrows, catching one in her shoulder for her trouble. “Fuck.” She snapped off the fletching and ripped out the shaft, letting it clatter to the deck.
Jasper hopped up behind the ship’s wheel, providing Graybeard and Sam cover from behind until the last of the arrows had fallen.
Frank fired a bomb lance into the air, hitting the owl knight’s mount. They rolled to the side before it detonated, sending an umbrella of gore and feathers and limbs to rain down around the deck.
“Jasper!” Vicky sprinted to the bow and leapt over the side. The dragon dove beneath her as she left the surface of the deck, and hung above the battle below. She slammed down between two of his curved spines and they sped into the air.
A soulsword snapped from her right hand, dense and brilliant and licking out with a power that shouldn’t have been there. It felt like the Burning Lands, like she was standing in the middle of the Sea of Souls. She closed her fist, and the blade lashed out like a whip, splitting a fairy into a sparking ruin of broken wings and wards.
Jasper opened his jaws as a line of owl knights regrouped above them. A blue inferno sent them screaming to their deaths. She pulled the dragon into a wide circle, clearing the air around the Bone Sails as the ship careened through the tentacles of a usurper, unleashing cannons and bolts of Gaia’s magics against the things.
But it was there, from far above her friends, that she saw it. Or rather, that she didn’t see it. The dark-touched. The only vampires on the field were dead, and as her gaze trailed back to Falias, she realized the dark-touched had abandoned the battlements, and what few cloaks remained were retreating back into the city.
Vicky looked to the other usurper, where Nudd and Morrigan and Edgar had clashed again. Only now they’d drawn the attention of the gravemakers, and the things had circled them like a grotesque audience come to watch an execution.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I looked around at the darkness. Back in the Abyss. I squeezed my hand again and stepped forward, trying to envision the battlefield at Falias, and when the light returned, so did the piercing screams of the dying Fae.
My legs shook as I stumbled out of the Abyss, but a strong hand caught me.
“I have you.”
The face of one who should not be there greeted me. “Nixie?”
“Been following you. We’re not done yet. Not much water here for me to do anything.”
I glanced away from her, and down to the searing blue orb in her hand. “But you have the Eye. You can do anything with that.”
She smiled and looked to the battle behind us. “So you could hear us. But I can’t do anything with it, Damian. We have to kill Nudd, or this is never going to end.”
&n
bsp; I shook my head. “I’m not strong enough to beat him. I can barely stand up.”
Nixie looked back to me. “Gaia’s power. It’s taking a toll on you. You need more rest than you have time for, Damian. Zola is here, on the Bone Sails. Can you feel the power that ship has pulled from the Burning Lands?”
And as she spoke, I watched the Bone Sails glide through the ranks of Nudd’s allies, firing cannons and incantations and more onto that field. And farther, beyond that, I could sense the gravemakers, which had once formed my prison, swarming together.
Above us, turning the sky to molten blue fire and ash, soared a dragon, and upon her back, rode a Demon Sword.
“Drake!” I shouted, so loud I thought my throat might tear. But the dragon shifted, spiraling down to us as it burned away Unseelie Fae.
A bloodied Drake greeted me, a smile on his face that was terribly out of place. “So, you live.”
“Get me to the Bone Sails, would you?”
The knight held out his arm and I took it.
I looked back to Nixie. “Get out of here. Stay safe, if you can.”
She scoffed and hopped onto the dragon. “Fuck you, Damian.”
Drake laughed. “Marriage problems already?”
“We aren’t married,” we answered simultaneously.
Drake’s dragon almost sounded like she chortled as she took to the air, and we shot toward the Bone Sails.
* * *
We passed Foster and Aideen as they pirouetted around each other in a ballet of death. Unseelie Fae and the scattered bits of a lamprey creature fell to pieces in the merciless assault of the fairies.
Beyond them was Dirge with a squad of green men, their backs guarded by a pair of Utukku as they tore through Nudd’s line, though more than one of the green men lay unmoving upon the earth. Terrence was there, firing what looked very much like my pepperbox, but the ungodly destruction it wreaked on the Fae couldn’t have been my gun.
“You’ll have to jump,” Drake said. “She can’t land on that ship without changing.”