Seraphs

by Faith Hunter

  Chapter 11

  Outside, Audric shouted, “Thorn!” It was a battle cry. Relief whipped through me. Before I could reply, the barn door clattered. Three-fingered hands pried around it on three sides, claws gripping the wood. I slashed and hacked, severing fingers that flipped into the air, splattering black blood. Spawn shrieked in pain. With a squeal of tearing metal hinges and splintering wood, the spawn ripped the door off the barn. I almost swore as they raced inside. Long-legged, mole-bodied, and red-furred, patterned in indistinct stripes and spots, spawn had bat ears and big teeth shaped for tearing meat. And poisonous saliva and acidic blood.

  I whirled the shovel. Slammed it into the face of the closest spawn, cut and slashed the next two. Audric bellowed again, this time from ground level. The battle cry was one I had never heard before. “Raziel! By blood and fire!”

  My blood heating, I shouted back, “Jehovah sabaoth!”

  The spawn entering the barn slowed at the words, and I knocked three to the ground before they found whatever wits they had. The shovel wasn’t sharp enough to behead them, but I did serious damage to their throats. Battle-lust and mage-speed heated my blood, burning out fear.

  It was full night, the ground an unfamiliar, muddy dark from the melted snow. Audric raced to the barn entrance, moving like an African-Asian prince, his katana and wakizashi flashing in the dim light of the upstairs windows. Without losing the pace of his cutting and slashing, he threw two long-bladed knives, impaling spawn at my feet. I tossed the shovel and grabbed the hilts. Beheading the injured was the work of two swings, one left-handed, one right. The tantos blades were pointed to allow for throwing, but double-edged for cutting, and wicked sharp, the blade length more suitable for shortswords for my shorter, more slender arms. I spun them once. I liked them. A lot. They were perfect.

  Blood splattered hotly across my back. Acidic spawn blood, not Audric’s. I felt the burn through my clothes. “Need light?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said shortly, breath fast but steady, his concentration focused on sounds and currents of air that signaled spawn movements.

  Mages have better night vision than most half-breeds, and a lot better than humans. I swung at three spawn, taking both arms off one and sending the others back. One-handed, I tossed two illumination amulets onto the ground, where they splattered into the water. Audric swiveled so we stood back-to-back. “Horses and Zeddy are shielded in the barn,” I said.

  Audric beheaded two spawn with a single swipe, his kill totals rising now that he could see. “Snow?”

  “Fire.” I took one and damaged another.

  “Smart. How many?” he asked, cutting the legs from beneath a beast.

  I counted. “Seventeen dead or injured. Maybe six left on the ground, four on the roof. Odd thing, though,” I said, darting close to a spawn, pricking it through the lungs, and darting back. “They aren’t eating their dead. And they’re better organized than most spawn.”

  “Make it four alive on the ground. Leader?”

  “Could be. I haven’t seen one. Three,” I said, dispatching another. Just then two spawn leaped out of the dark, from overhead. One landed on Audric’s back, knocking him to his knees. It bit down. Audric bellowed and I switched my grip, wedging the point under the spawn’s nose and ripping toward me, taking off the top of its head. It fell, and Audric knocked the lower jaw and body loose, kicking it away. He moved with a grunt of pain. He was hurt. Maybe hurt bad. I handed him a healing amulet, hoping it would be enough.

  “Two o’clock,” he said. “Red eyes.”

  To my right I saw an indistinct form at the back doorway of the linen shop, its shoulder pressing against the brick. Though I only caught a glimpse, I knew it was Malashe-el, the daywalker who had fed off Lucas. Enraged, for reasons I didn’t examine, I shouted my battle cry again, lunged, and cut, taking two spawn heads at once. Malashe-el moved into the dark, beginning to fade from my thoughts. It carried a rune of forgetting, a dangerous and powerful tool. I struggled to keep it in my mind, following it with mage-sight.

  The world suddenly quieted and, weapons held in defensive postures, I looked around. The spawn were all down. Audric moved among the bodies, beheading the ones still twitching. He moved with a limp. I tossed him a second healing amulet, and he caught it in the dark. We were both glowing; we had released control of our neomage attributes. He lifted a hand and touched his throat, activating his lightning-bolt amulet. His skin faded to human dullness and he picked up the illumination amulets, pocketing one and handing me the other. No townsfolk had come to help us, though we had made an awful racket. Cowards, I thought viciously.

  When I looked back, Malashe-el stood an arm’s length before me, holding an amulet. Audric and I had forgotten all about it. Its eyes blazed red, fangs ratcheted wide.

  Lightning-fast, I slashed. The walker moved faster, stabbing toward my left side with the amulet. As it moved toward me, demon-fast, I saw the talisman. A talon. No. A spur. A dragonet spur. Under my guard, faster than I could block, the spur pierced my side. Pain exploded. I stumbled. My heart stuttered as if poison pumped through it rather than blood.

  From behind, I heard Audric bellow and the sound of blades slashing, grunts and the impact of weapons on flesh. I doubled over, gagging. Malashe-el caught me, seized the tantos, and threw them. He hammered the amulet into me. The world tilted. Agony like a spear of hellfire burst through me, tearing. Dazed, falling, I reached for my prime amulet. I had a moment to wonder about Audric. Burning blood sprayed over me. Pain razored deep. My fingers scrabbled to find the four-inch stone, my prime ring.

  Malashe-el lifted me and spun to race away. My face was pressed into its shirt. I smelled flowers and mold. My fingers encircled the ring. Brain fuzzy, having no incantation prepared, I summoned power gathered in the melded stones of the prime. Desperate, wordless, I called to it. I felt energies gather in the prime and in my torso, centering beneath my sternum. My vision was going dark. My hand was so heavy I could barely lift the ring. I pressed the prime amulet to its chest.

  The daywalker stumbled and fell to one knee. I heard the swing of a sword, and the thunk of bone as a blade impacted the walker’s calf. He dropped me, and as we separated, my heart thundered in my ears. The fall to the ground took two heartbeats, heartbeats coiled with pain from the stab wound. I hit and rolled, the breath knocked from me. My prime blazed.

  I lay staring at the black sky, trying to remember how to breathe. My skin flared with pain as melted snow drenched through my clothes. Snowmelt stung like liquid fire, draining my energies pulling power from the primes to protect me. Water saturated the acidic spawn blood absorbed in my clothes, washing it against my flesh. If I’d been able, I would have screamed.

  The torment flared, doubling, as I took a breath. The prime amulet in my hand was hot to the touch, flooding my body with stone power. I released it. One-handed, I felt my side. And found nothing, no torn flesh, no spur amulet, though my hand came away bloody.

  I heard feet racing near me, one set, uneven. Two blades hit the ground near my outstretched legs. The tantos, by the sound of them. They’d need serious attention from the ill usage of this night.

  Two breaths later, I rolled to my knees and followed the footsteps, plucking the weapons Audric had tossed out of the ground. Audric was chasing the walker in the general direction of my spring. I almost laughed.

  I drew on the amulets, all of them, to stabilize my heartbeat and breathing, and to fight the poison of the psychic injury. I veered around Audric and the wounded walker. Shaken, slowed, I was still fast. The walker’s blood sprayed in arterial spurts across the wet ground, brighter in the snow as they headed uphill. Audric grunted with each breath, limping.

  I herded them both toward the ring of stones and my spring. It was protected with a conjure to keep it hidden from the attention of any nonhuman, and to capture any supernat that touched its ringing stones. Circling around, I came hard from the south.

  Just as Malashe-el limped past the spr
ing, I threw one of the tantos. It thumped into the walker, the blade penetrating under its right arm. It fell, one hand out to catch itself, and touched a rounded boulder that ringed the spring.

  The first part of the double-whammy conjure snapped into place with a sizzle of sound, the trap-shield rising and covering the spring and the boulders that contained the power for the conjure. This part was little more than an inverted shield, meant to keep prey in, not predators out. As Malashe-el fell and rolled, the spring erupted with part two of the incantation, drenching the walker with water, the conjure draining much of its Dark power. Malashe-el screamed, the keen long and furious, then pained, as if it were two instead of one.

  Audric skidded to a halt, staring at the spring. It was the most complicated conjure I had ever attempted. I was apt to use raw power to bully my way through most problems. This was a thing of beauty. As an unanticipated side effect of trapping it, the pain in my side lessened. I bent over and rested my hands on my knees. Breathing was suddenly easier.

  Gasping, Audric sat on the frozen ground, landing hard, his longsword across his thighs, the shortsword on the ground. Both dripped blood onto the snow. I sat beside him on a rock peeking from the ground, the remaining tanto reversed, pointing behind me. “Very nice,” he said, catching his breath.

  “Thanks.” Sitting in the dark, watching the walker howl and roll in pain, I handed Audric a final healing amulet. “Put it over the fang punctures. It’ll neutralize the toxins.” A human might have died from the venom in the saliva, but Audric wouldn’t. He’d be sicker than plague-stricken monkeys, however, unless we counteracted the poison. I had made some amulets following my last encounter with spawn. I couldn’t count on the presence of a friendly, helpful seraph every time I got into trouble. Seraphs hadn’t given the human world much attention in the last few decades, and the neomage world even less.

  In its cage, luminous blue and green energies and gold sparkles arcing over the spring, Malashe-el writhed and cursed and beat against the walls. Its red eyes spit hatred each time they landed on me. It pulled the tanto from its side with a gush of blood and threw the blade at the shield. It bounced off, clanging on the stones.

  “Will it live?” Audric asked, breathing hard.

  “Probably. If it gets control of itself in time to reserve some blood. If it gets to eat.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Audric asked after a few minutes. His voice sounded more normal.

  “I don’t know. But see its eyes? They used to be blue-green, like labradorite stone. Almost incandescent.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t think it was originally pure Darkness. I think it was created out of the genetic patterns of a Major Darkness and something else.” When Audric didn’t laugh or shoot down my theory, I said, “Either it chose Darkness, or it’s possessed. If it chose the Dark, we’ll kill it. If it’s possessed against its will, the control will lessen with daylight.” Thinking about the questions Lolo hadn’t answered, I said, “Maybe we could get some information out of it.”

  Seconds passed. Audric watched Malashe-el thrash. The daywalker pulled the spur amulet from its pocket and attacked the shield, stabbing at the energies with ferocity and speed that was hard to follow. The shield was unchanged, though it sizzled with the blows. When Audric spoke, his tone was deceptively casual. “You know how to exorcise a demon?”

  “Not yet. But I might by morning.”

  “And the weakness in your side, left from your vision underground? I saw what the touch of that amulet did to you.” I had nothing to say to that. We both knew I had a problem.

  “Hey! You want to let me out of here?” a voice shouted. “Thorn?”

  “Oops. Forgot about Zeddy,” I said.

  “I’ll keep watch over your daywalker,” Audric said. “You release the boy and tell Rupert what happened. Ask him to bring me a sandwich and some water. Maybe a blanket.”

  “You don’t have to stay here. The trap won’t fail. The walker was drenched with water from the spring. It’s stuck until I release it.” Zeddy shouted again, wondering if I was alive. I shouted back to hold his horses, hoping the humor would give him some patience.

  As if he hadn’t heard me, Audric said, “I’ll wait here until you try an exorcism. Or until it dies. But you get to clean up the spawn. They’ll stink by morning, even in the cold.”

  He was right. Spawn smelled like rotting meat, their decay process fast. As helpful townspeople had yet to appear, I’d pay Zeddy to pile and burn them, but I didn’t think it would be cheap. And I wondered what the town would say about the unwanted mage attracting a horde of spawn. Whatever they came up with, it wouldn’t be nice. They would have let me die out here, and probably been tickled pink about it. Tired, aching, feeling the pain in my side like a boil, I rose and went to the loft.

  I showered fast and hung a healing amulet inside my T-SHIRT when I dressed, one that would help the acid burns, the cuts, and the pain in my side. As I dressed, I realized that Joseph Barefoot hadn’t appeared to help with the spawn either. Maybe if I’d had time to hang a cloth in my window, I thought wryly.

  After the bath, wrapped in an afghan, I ate cottage cheese, frozen blueberries, a bowl of canned beans, and a fresh pear, which had been trucked in on a mule train. The pear had cost me dearly, but was worth every dollar. Fresh fruit in winter was for rich people. Or someone willing to do without necessities. I fit into the latter category, and had gone without much protein for the past month. In an ice age, one had to choose between survival supplies and pleasure. Paying for the pear had been one such choice. I ate every part of the fruit except the seeds, which I kept for Rupert and Jacey. I couldn’t grow weeds in summer, but my best friends had greener thumbs. Maybe they could grow a pear tree.

  With my aches and pains relieved, and appetite appeased, I curled in bed and studied the Book of Workings, trying not to think about Audric out in the night, watching over my detainee. The Book of Workings wasn’t a magical book. It had no special powers or energies, and few ready-made incantations. It was more a roadmap, a schoolbook, a compilation of the learnings of the first neomages. Having no teachers, they had been trying to find out what they were, and what they could do. The book was divided into three parts, the back of the book devoted to warfare. It was to that section that I turned, covers up under my chin, two blades in the bed, and my amulets around my neck.

  Toward midnight the smell of burning and rotting spawn filtered in, the scent harsh as burned feathers in the back of my throat. I was breathing the foul flavor when I found the pages on exorcism. Unlike seraphs, mages are mortal and, unlike humans, we have no souls. Mortal and soulless, mages can’t call on the One True God, God the Victorious, for help. Prayer doesn’t work for us. He doesn’t hear us. Seraphs will hear us if we, or innocents, are near death, but many theologians insist that God won’t. Other theologians contend that if he doesn’t hear an intelligent creature, it proves he isn’t real and never was, but that was a theological argument for passionate believers and heretics, and all I wanted to do was cast out an evil demon, if it could be done without calling on the name of the Most High.

  To my knowledge, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews did not traditionally cast out demons when their people were possessed. Some Hindus tried to placate Darkness, leaving offerings so demons would depart. Only Christians historically cast out minions of the Darkness. Christians, who, by faith, called on the blood and name of Christ to overpower a possessing demon. Blood given in willing sacrifice had great power over evil. I had been raised Christian by my parents and the Enclave priestess, who hoped to persuade the Most High to give us souls. It hadn’t happened. And since I had become an outcast, I hadn’t really worshipped, the faith of my childhood waning. Ergo, I wasn’t equipped to deal with a case of possession.

  In the pages on exorcism, I discovered two things that might help me. A conjure to track a Darkness through mage blood, and a seraph who offered its power to first bind and then exorcise demons. The winge
d-warrior Mutuol promised his name and power to help mages defeat evil in one-on-one spiritual combat. I studied the implements and methods offered in the resource book for mages.

  Once bound, the incantation on exorcism might work. A daywalker was not technically a demon—an immortal being who was spirit but could manifest in one or two physical forms. A daywalker was mortal, a Minor Darkness, restricted to one physical shape. It was soulless—much like neomages, though few mages would have accepted the similarity. My Bible beside me, my blades on the tables and floor around me, I studied the incantation suggestions, sought scriptures to bring Light and power to them, and made copious notes.

  This wasn’t some conjure to heat bathwater. This was warfare. I had to do it right or I might die in the process. Many early neomages had.

  Chapter 12

  They threw him into the cell, weak with blood loss. He fell hard on his severed wings, the bones bending with his weight, buried his head in his arms, and wept. He didn’t hide his sobs, his voice broken, like cracked bells and splintered flutes. The pain was beyond anything he had experienced since they’d first clipped his wings, rendering him unable to fly from the deeps of the pit, unable to defeat time, unable to contact another of his kind. Since that time, the Darkness had merely shaved the stubs of his wings every twenty-four hours, the trimming keeping him bound. Until today, they had merely allowed the heat-driven mage to try to force him to mate. Merely.

  Today, to punish him, they had cut him deeper, much deeper. Using human steel, daywalkers had removed his wings to the shoulders. They had broken him utterly. It was the smell that ruined him. The growing aroma of sex and death, like nothing he had ever smelled before. He had failed the Most High. Because of the scent, the strange odor, he hadn’t been able to prevent them from taking his essence.

  Fists clenched, he beat his bed until his hands bled, screaming, his broken voice echoing down the hallways. His blood trickled across his naked back and onto his feathers, blood that smelled of life and Light, of blooming flowers, scents that taunted, recalling the earth that he had once loved enough to abandon heaven. The scent nearly overpowered the smell of the walkers he had killed, their rancid blood sprayed against the walls and spilled over the floor. His blood, a thing of life and healing, a construct of heaven, had been turned against him. He screamed, his agony long and loud. Somewhere near, he knew the Darkness was laughing.