Beneath us, the deadly fireworks of gunfire split the night like a butcher’s blade. I cringed, the three of us glancing at one another with apprehension, then peeked over the ridge.
To my relief, Hollowed-out military men were still no match for a Moroi princess—at least, not in small numbers. Tamara leapt like a predator onto the first to shake off her captivation, effortlessly sweeping the much larger man’s legs out from under him. In the same fluid motion, she was atop him, punching down with her wire whip wrapped tight around one pale fist. Blood flew; I could smell it from all the way up the hill. As he died, gun firing uselessly into the night sky, the next closest regained his senses, leveling a drum-fed, tactical shotgun at Tamara’s head.
He froze as he met her eyes, unable to resist their draw. As more of the Hollow company stirred, he twisted and shifted his aim, pumping a short-range blast into the nearest of his former companions, then knocking them down with the butt of his gun. “Defend me!” Tamara cried, and he shakily moved to do just that, blocking Tamara from the line of fire with his body, as if she were now the most important thing in the world to him.
I reluctantly tore my eyes away from the increasingly violent scene. “Sloss,” I rasped at Charles. His eyes widened. “We’re at Sloss Furnaces. You know it, right?” Lori and I had been to enough concerts and Halloweens here for me to recognize its distinctive nighttime silhouette, even with a very different kind of noise and lights playing in the background.
“One of the most supernaturally active locales in the South? Yes, I know it.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the short bursts of combat below. “In fact, I should have fucking known. Find the ritual energy,” he barked at me. Turning to Corey, he snapped his fingers in the boy’s face, grabbing his attention.
“Corey.” Charles slapped his hand down on his apprentice’s shoulder, speaking quickly, his voice deep and deadly serious. He shoved the backpack into the younger man’s arms. “Heat these like I showed you, then throw them quickly into any clusters of Hollow Men you spot, and keep moving. Stay low and out of sight behind cover, and for Christ’s sake, don’t hit Tamara with one or get yourself shot.” Worry lined the corners of his dark eyes as he squeezed the younger magician’s shoulder firmly, until Corey nodded that he understood. Then he pushed the boy gently in a direction that would arc him around into a dark area behind the scattered group of increasingly aggressive Hollows, who were rapidly descending into a chaotic, pitched gun battle.
“Which way?” The older wizard met my concerned expression with a stoic, purposeful face, his eyes hard as fate and still slightly out of focus. I pointed wordlessly. The mirror portal had landed us pretty far from our mark, as far as I was concerned. We’d come out in the grassy, hilly expanse littered with rows of stone historical markers that stood between the parking lot and the concert pavilion—which is precisely where I felt the building energies of the Strigoi ritual coming from.
We had some running to do, since it was a good hundred years away.
The wizard didn’t wait for me, taking off at a fast, sustainable pace in the direction I’d pointed. I caught up, but Charles managed to keep pace with me as we ran.
“Will Corey be okay?” I hissed out a loud, hoarse whisper of concern, still surprised the wizard had sent his apprentice into battle against well-armed, brainwashed mercenaries with nothing but his wits and a sack full of aerosol spray cans. “Why did—”
“Because it’s far safer than what we’re about to do,” he cut me off, tossing out clipped words in between taking the measured breaths of an experienced sprinter. He gave me a serious look and a slight, cynical shake of his head as we raced into the darkness. “Good luck.”
I swallowed hard.
Ahead, under the massive pavilion, I felt death-energies gathering, an invisible storm rife with dark potential that boded ill for all save those that controlled it. An ominous scene set against a backdrop of dead, rusted smokestacks that clawed at the sky and murky, roiling clouds cast in tones of iron and gray.
We covered ground to the sound of further gunfire and a dull, ground-shaking boom behind us, the first of many to come. Charles stumbled several times before I remembered he was more than half blind in the dark, and he was breathing deeply by the time we reached the edge of the long pavilion.
Towers and decayed metal frameworks dominated the darkened skyline before disappearing ominously into the night, mute witnesses to tonight’s horrors and festivities. All around us, lightless Sloss spread out, with the old, defunct blast furnaces foreboding and impassive in the distance. I’d heard the legends since I first came to Birmingham, the tales of hauntings and unexplained deaths, about corpses mixed into the cement foundation and never recovered. While I’d never believed it before, tonight was enough to change my mind. But if the tales were true, even the ghosts had enough sense to steer clear of the site tonight.
I knew Sloss hosted gatherings and concerts in its main hall-like area, a structure that was a hybrid of a long, metal-topped pavilion and a concert stage, and that’s where we were headed, straight into that sense of foreboding. The structure was open in the front, dipping down into the ground slowly along its length, and dead-ending in a wide, open stage—the same raised platform I’d seen in the mirror but hadn’t recognized. I managed to catch Charles’ arm in my vice-like grip before the wizard split from me and went the wrong way.
“This way,” I insisted quietly. Assuming their eyes worked like mine, if he’d stepped foot into the mouth of the pavilion proper the other Strigoi would have seen him coming all the way from the opposite end of the building. “Unless you want to end up like me,” I added.
He made a face, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. To my relief, he didn’t argue, either.
We circled around, and I led him quickly along the side of the structure, the roof slowly coming down to meet us. The sides of the building never met the roof, leaving a good eight foot gap framed by heavy support beams, probably intended to let out the heat that a couple of smelting furnaces—or nowadays, a few thousand bodies—tended to generate. “Faster,” Charles hissed, his voice urgent. “It’s starting!”
That gap also gave us an easy view of the ensuing sacrifices.
Even with my limited knowledge, it looked like a killing ritual. Twelve struggling girls, clothes ripped and torn, bound securely and on their knees in a circle, throats exposed. Arcane sigils and symbols, drawn along the edges of the platform and in the center, burned a putrid yellow-green with power in my mind’s eye; I could feel each and every one from where I stood. The half-charred aberration still stalked the outer edges of the ritual, her vicious, not-really-sane grin a raw crack across the burnt steak of her face. She didn’t need a ritual dagger, as her short, savage claws were already bare and twitching with eager anticipation.
The older vampire faced the circle, supernaturally still except where she sketched shapes in the air in front of her pale, drawn face—invisible figures that crackled with static and shook the air with rampant, entropic energy. I’d come into this with hopes that the dark-haired Strigoi sorceress below wasn’t a magical match for Charles, but a combination of him puffing shallowly behind me with fatigue and the sheer power emanating from the setup below left me with some serious doubts.
Charles and I slid to a stop, poised at the very top of the wall overlooking the stage, and nodded to one another. There was no time for any fancy planning, or for any planning at all. I tensed, ready to jump in as soon as the wizard acted, hoping that the pair of vampires below hadn’t already heard the heavy thump of his heartbeat.
Charles’ hands blurred as they reached Next Door.
The ritual concluded.
The oppressive weight of death and magic settled over Sloss like a radioactive cloud. Before my very eyes, one after another, young women slumped over, limp and lifeless, their silenced heartbeats stripped from the symphony below.
Stunned and horrified, I hesitated, and another innocent died.
My vision turned red at the edges, and I threw myself off the wall and toward the heart of the ongoing ritual. Straight at my killer, who stood there laughing as others died all around her.
Behind me, Charles’ chanted words of power became interspersed with virulent curses as I engaged, his voice rising and taking on an uneven, frenzied tempo.
I smashed into the stage, stumbled to a knee and cracked the wooden flooring. I’d missed my mark, unable to leap as far as I’d wanted, landing several feet away from the blond Strigoi that now blinked at me with wide, startled eyes. I’d hoped that passing through the ring of glowing sigils that encircled the stage would disrupt the ongoing spell, but all it did was show how little I knew about magic and expose me to the raw, unbridled death energy flowing freely inside.
Right in front of me, close enough to reach out and touch, a panicked girl still in her teens withered and died, slumping to the ground, the survivors shuddering openly in fear. I felt her spirit join with the rest of the roiling storm of energy trapped on stage. I changed course and charged straight at Ariande, desperate to stop the ritual before it claimed another life.
Dana the Strigoi stepped in the way. My secondary killer.
I bulled forward into her, catching her off guard as I tucked my shoulder into her sternum. She staggered but kept her footing, sliding across the stage before digging in and stopping me cold. Dark, dead blood flew as I twisted, claws bursting from my fingers as I swept them at her in a brutal uppercut completely lacking in finesse. She turned, stiff but quick, and caught them in the meat of her forearm instead of under the chin like I’d intended. My metallic talons met dead Strigoi flesh, and I finally found out what all of my newfound enemies had been dealing with for the past two days: my long, deadly claws tore shallow chunks of crusted, charred meat from her body, then stopped, meeting more opposition in her burned flesh than they had with steel or stone.
Claws tore free of my other hand and surged for her face, but hers were out and ready as well. They met with a dull ring, grating edge on edge hard enough to spark, as she matched my superhuman strength with her own. We reached a stalemate, feet braced, one hand locked claw to claw, my other submerged in roasted flesh and overcooked corpse.
“There you are,” she hissed with satisfaction. Her body was still split in two like the death goddess of legend: one side was grotesque, the other, petite, blond, and younger than me with dead blue eyes that glittered with menace. Her voice was damaged too, though not as badly as mine, and unlike mine, hers was recovering itself by the moment, even while she spoke. “We were wondering if you’d show up and make this easier on us.” I felt another death and before my eyes, her ruined flesh continued to peel back, healing from left to right in a reversed parody of the process that had damaged it in the first place. I watched as her cruel smile peeked out from cracked skin, half her mouth upturned wickedly as she regenerated.
I growled wordlessly in response. Behind her, Ariande continued her ritual unperturbed, singling out another helpless prisoner with impassive eyes and a claw-tipped, outstretched hand.
Then the earthquake hit.
The magic Charles had been cooking up wasn’t as potent as the real deal, but caught in the epicenter, it was close enough. Waves of force rippled through the structure, passing through stone, metal, dirt, and solid cement stage alike. The ritual platform danced and shuddered, causing everything that wasn’t nailed down to hop and slide around like it was suddenly possessed.
That included candles, books, captives, other ritual instruments, and three Strigoi. As my grapple partner and I danced about, desperately seeking balance, Ariande cursed in some archaic language. She stumbled and nearly fell, and the circle of sigils trapping the ritual energy surged, the magic suddenly whipped to a fever pitch. With an earsplitting crack, the stage started to split at the edge, compressed magical energy pushing against it and slowly leaking out, straining ominously against the vampiric magician’s control.
“Get out of my way!” I snarled at the younger, smaller Strigoi I struggled with. I tried to lift her off her feet to sling her bodily aside and off the stage, but my balance wasn’t good enough to break hers. Instead, she slipped and slid to a knee, dragging me down to her level with a fang-bearing snarl of her own.
“No way!” she spat the words in my face. “I won’t let you hurt her!”
I blinked in surprise. Whatever I’d expected from her, that wasn’t it. Taking advantage of my momentary distraction, she surged back to her feet, leaving me on one knee, awkwardly poised and bent backward.
Past her, I could only watch as Charles continued his assault. From his vantage point above us, an impressive and terrifying lance of flame the length of a small car blazed abruptly into existence, bright enough to send light and shadow waltzing throughout the pavilion and hot enough to warm my face from forty feet away. It hovered menacingly for an instant before plunging at the heart of the enemy spellcaster.
But the elder Strigoi was even faster, insanely fast, faster than Tamara, quicker than any mere human could ever be. Her hands twisted in obscure gestures, and she set her feet firmly against the waves of the bucking stage, reaching toward the sky and uttering a single, rigid command. As the hot lance of death plunged down, she plucked one of the girls’ circling spirits from the air, shaping it with her hands into a semi-solid shield.
As if from very far away, I heard a despairing scream as the red hot conjuration collided with her protective magic, the fire burning away as the two spells mutually destroyed each other. Her dark, shadowed eyes narrowed in concentration, the scream, shield, and blazing lance all giving out at the same instant. A few, flickering swirls of flame survived, landed on the stage, and set the wooden platform on alight. Each fire slowly started spreading, but fortunately none were near me. The Strigoi magician spared a glance for me and the bits of scattered flame, but her focus returned quickly to Charles. Her hands were already moving, clawing and slicing sharply at the air with a disciplined precision that could only have been earned by untold ages of practice.
Dana sneered at me, as if touting her mistress’ superiority, but the expression died away as, bit by bit, I forced her back. “You already lost this fight once,” I snapped, straining. I pushed her backward until our clench became a stalemate as I steadily rose from kneeling. Claws grated on claws as our hands locked together, and my other set dug deeper and deeper into her forearm until I managed to grab her wrist. “Don’t make me do this.” I could feel her undead body trembling with effort as I slowly bent her backward instead.
Atop the wall, Charles leapt surprisingly high into the air, tucking his body in tight. I worried he was going to land badly on the solid concrete or fall off of the wall into the pavilion, but he didn’t. Instead, the ground flexed softly, catching his momentum gently and storing it like a coiled spring. One last shudder wrenched at the ground, churned the earth and sent Dana and me staggering madly one final time. The powerful jolt wrenching the earth cut off as suddenly as it had begun, all of the quake’s ripples condensing and yanking together to a single point. A lance of mixed rock and concrete punched through the platform and split the stage, catching Ariande directly under the chin. A dull crack of bone reached my ears as the Strigoi spellcaster staggered, her concentration shattered along with her jaw.
But, as Charles himself had told me, Strigoi were tougher than iron.
She stumbled back, her feet not even leaving the ground from the force of the impact, and she recovered with uncanny quickness. The blow didn’t stun her as it would someone living, and she didn’t recoil in fear or pain. By the time Charles straightened from the spell he’d just unleashed, Ariande was finishing hers.
Her hands blurre
d; she seemed faster and better at reaching Next Door than the human wizard. The Strigoi dragged one claw, vibrating with Next Door energy, through the air as if sawing through resistance. As she did so, I felt the rip she tore in our world, a not-sound more visceral than hearing your own flesh slowly torn open.
A rift split our reality apart. It shifted and danced impossibly in the air as the seething energy on the other side poured through into the ritual circle.
It felt like death itself.
27
And the award for best monster goes to...
Something dark on the other side peered through, stirring just beyond the raw, straining Window. The girls who lay dead on the ground spasmed as one and joined their voices into an agonized chorus that poured from lifeless throats. Palpable energy, straining for release, funneled through the rift, writhing and undulating. Reality itself groaned as the potent display of spellcasting forced it to bow aside.
The power flooding through the rift was a coffin nail in my own fight as well. Dana broke my grip and shoved me backwards as if I wasn’t super-strong in the slightest. Before I could recover, she kicked my legs out from under me, dropping me onto my knees, and leapt on me, claws searching for my throat and face as I barely held her at bay. She grinned viciously as she loomed over me, her fangs bared in impending victory. I managed to seize her wrists just in time to avoid being carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, but I knew full well I couldn’t hold her off for very long.
“See?” she hissed at me, her face close to mine, her dead eyes alight with inner crazy. “Things are different now! You and I have a score to settle.” She put a knee in my chest and pushed me helplessly backward, the rusted blades of her claws inching toward my eyes as the young Strigoi took her time, making sure I got a good long look at what was coming.
Dead Girl's Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 1) Page 25