The Obsidian Order Boxed Set

by martinez, katerina

  “Some, but probably not enough to stop these bad boys.” Elrik flashed his rifle.

  “They’re definitely hunters, then” Crag put in.

  Draven looked up at me, reluctance shining through those black eyes of his. “Can you use one of those?” he asked, nodding at Greyson’s rifle.

  “Pretty sure I had this discussion with Crag,” I said, “I can handle a gun.”

  “Good. Grab this rifle, take point, and watch the hunters until I say so. Then, start shooting.”

  I grabbed Elrik’s rifle, swung it over my shoulder, and slipped out of the protective bubble without saying another word, rushing over to the ruined stone wall and perching my rifle over the edge. The voices had returned, but they were only slightly uncomfortable to listen to—I definitely wasn’t in any pain, not like the others were.

  I glanced back and watched as Draven gave his commands to the troops huddling close to him inside that protective bubble. He was an asshole, but I couldn’t help admire his confidence, the way he spoke, the way he only said what he meant to say, and always made sure his words were spoken with intent. I’d never tell him any of this, though.

  Still, I—something sharp bit into my arm. I winced and jerked away from the sensation, checking the source of the injury. My jumpsuit had been ripped into and I was bleeding. It wasn’t a deep cut, but the blood still came regardless, trickling down my bicep and over my elbow.

  This must have been what Draven was talking about. The stone’s singing couldn’t hurt me, but these phantom cuts could. I took another deep breath of that sharp, crisp air and concentrated, settling my focus around the rifle in my hands and throwing my vision through the scope.

  It took me a moment to find them, but there they were; five of them in total, but one of them was on his knees. Of the other four that were standing, two of them were women. Greyson’s recon had been accurate; they weren’t wearing any kind of bulletproof vests, but they were wrapped what looked like thick leather armor with fur collars, and arm-wraps that just about covered their entire forearms.

  They were also armed to the teeth.

  As I watched, one of them—the biggest among them—kicked the kneeling man in the back and sent him to the floor, flat on his chest. I couldn’t get a good look at the guy who had fallen, but he wasn’t dressed like the others. He had normal clothes on; a leather jacket, jeans, boots. Was he a prisoner?

  The biggest of the hunters nodded at one of the women, who then pulled one of the many knives she was carrying out of its sheath and approached their prisoner. My finger was on the trigger, my scope set on her head despite the flurry of snow and the flashing light. I had her, and with a single bullet I’d be able to stop her from doing what she was about to do. I didn’t know who that guy was, but they were about to kill him.

  Draven had told me to wait for his signal, though, and as I looked back, I saw they were only just starting to get up and start moving through the ruin, keeping close to Draven and his magic shield. I settled my eye against the scope again. Now the woman was on her knees. She sat on his back, wrapped her fist in the man’s hair, pulled his head back, and placed the knife at his throat.

  Think, Seline, think! What do you do?

  “Fuck!” I cursed, then I breathed deep and pulled the trigger.

  The gun spat a burst of hot lead that struck the woman in her shoulder. Blood sprayed, and she toppled off the back of the guy she’d been sitting on. The wind and the flurry of snow had made my aim slide to the side, but she wasn’t getting back up from that anytime soon, at least. The others around her, though, had turned around and were starting to scatter.

  I trailed my scope on another hunter and fired, but the bullets plinked harmlessly against some rocks my target had managed to throw himself behind. I cursed again, trying to find a new mark, but they were all hiding now, including the hunter I’d dropped with my first round of firing. The guy she’d almost killed, however, was lying in the snow face down. I could see he was trying to get up, but he looked weak, and injured.

  “Seline, what the hell did you do?” Crag barked. He was the only one who had emerged from the magic bubble Draven was holding up.

  “I had to!” I yelled, “Look, there’s someone out there and he’s not with them.”

  “You should’ve let them kill him, now they know we’re—” The hunter came from out of nowhere, vaulting over a section of ruined wall and pouncing on Crag. Crag was huge, but this guy was also large, his skin was deep brown, hairy, and he stank like old leather. I’d only ever heard of the Ogres, but I’d never seen one before with my own eyes. He was all chords of thick muscle, and tough skin, and when he threw a punch at Crag’s face, I heard a distinct crack.

  I spun around with my rifle aimed high, but they were both moving so fast, I didn’t dare pull the trigger. Crag grabbed the Ogre by the throat and threw him into a wall. It crumbled under the force of the impact like it was made of dirt instead of stone.

  Crag was bleeding from a gash on his forehead, but his skin was quickly healing up—and turning grey right in front of me. As Crag moved, the dimensions of his face started changing to look rigid and stony, rather than soft and fleshy. Crag roared, the Ogre bellowed in return, his mouth opened wide to reveal a full set of crooked teeth and tusks, and the two of them went at it again like gladiators in a colosseum.

  I pulled my rifle up, changing my decision to shoot into the melee, and searched for another target. I wasn’t waiting long. One of the women crossed in front of my scope. She was sprinting toward me, an ax in one hand and a dagger in the other, her teeth bared.

  I squeezed the trigger and the gun clapped, the recoil pulling hard against my shoulder, but the bullets went through her like she was made of mist. Her body evaporated and shifted to the left to avoid the bullets, where it then reformed, never breaking her sprint. I fired again, and again the same thing happened. The bullets weren’t landing.

  I fired a third time, only now when she disappeared, she didn’t come back. I could hear Crag and the Ogre going twenty rounds somewhere nearby, but otherwise there was only the roar of the storm and no more movement.

  Then the hairs on the nape of my neck began to rise, and I spun around with the butt of the gun ready to strike. It was her, she’d manifested directly behind me, and it was only by sheer luck that I managed to deflect the potentially lethal strike of her ax with the back of my gun, sending it flying from her hand.

  I scrambled to my feet, drew my dagger from its sheath, and parried her next blow. Then we were fighting, tumbling around each other swapping swift, precise strikes with our daggers, the small blades singing as they clashed. She was fast, but I was fast too, and agile enough to match her movements.

  Where she would thrust, I would parry, then strike out toward her. I wasn’t sure what she was—Aevian, Elemental, Naga—but she never once dropped her glamor. Maybe she preferred to fight in human form, maybe it was more of a challenge than stripping her magic skin and revealing the true nature lying beneath it.

  Draven then appeared on the scene. His sword moved like water, its sharp edge swinging into view and deflecting my opponent’s dagger before she could hit a bit of my exposed hip. I’d let my guard slip for only a second, and she’d almost seriously wounded me as a result.

  I went to strike her, but Draven had stolen this combat from me. He had her attention, now, and they were locked in a shifting melee. I didn’t think a longsword had a chance against a dagger, not from so close, but then I noticed the small knife he was holding in his other hand. He was wielding both, one in each hand, and he wasn’t skipping a single beat.

  I backed up, searching for a clue, a choice to make, an order to carry out. I was alone. Crag and Draven ere both busy, Greyson was still incapacitated, and Elrik was watching over his comrade, his rifle raised. Spinning around on the spot, I caught a hint of movement through the furious torrent of snow and wind that seemed to be intensifying around us. Someone was moving closer to the stone.

 
; “Draven!” I yelled, “The stone!”

  “Don’t let them get it,” he said, his voice rising above the metal ringing of blades.

  Nodding, I turned around, vaulted over the broken wall—grabbing my rifle as I went—and started sprinting deeper into the winds. The force of the gust hitting me from one side was brutal. It was hard to keep my balance, let alone run. I had to put my head down and push harder, sheathing my dagger and keeping one hand over my eyes to make sure I could see where I was going.

  A sharp sting of pain cut across my leg, and I almost toppled from it. For an instant I thought one of the hunters had caught me, but there was no one near me. My bodysuit was ripped, though, and blood had started to trickle from a wound underneath it.

  Another phantom cut. How many of these would I have to endure?

  I kept moving, hurrying through the furious storm. The closer I got to the stone, the louder the voices in the back of my head became. I could hear not only talking right now, but also screaming, like someone was being hacked to pieces but somehow hadn’t passed out from the shock.

  I shook my head and kept moving, kept pushing through the wind, and the pain, and the snow, until I reached the man lying on his front. He’d stopped trying to get up and he wasn’t moving anymore. A dusting of snow was starting to build on his back and in his hair. I checked his neck with my fingertips. He’s cold, but there’s a pulse. He was alive, if only barely. I tapped his cheeks, but he wasn’t responding.

  “Shit,” I said, then I saw the shape in my periphery. Someone was standing in front of a pulsing, violet light directly ahead, their silhouette casting a huge shadow against the brightness in front of him.

  I took a position on my knees, aimed my rifle at him, and pulled the trigger. Just as the bullets were about to strike his skin, bright flashes of light erupted, absorbing or destroying the bullets without hurting him. Well, that’s not good. He spun around, and though I couldn’t see his face, I could see the impression of his full mane of hair, his thick beard, and even a cloak billowing with the wind.

  “You dare, little wretch?” he yelled. His voice was massive, and deep; raspy with age, or maybe just from the sheer force of it.

  “Fuck are you calling little, old man?” I called out.

  “I should’ve known the Obsidian Order would come to this place. You are like rats, scuttling around in the filth looking for scraps.”

  “Yeah? This rat has a gun, asshole.” I fired at him again, but the bullets only bounced off some kind of invisible shield, bursting into flashes of light instead of burying themselves into his skin.

  He bellowed, his voice booming despite the powerful winds sweeping through the area and the rolling thunder all around us. “You really think you can hurt me with that?”

  “Probably not, but I can distract the fuck out of you.”

  I’d heard Crag’s unmistakable stride rocking up nearby just as I’d fired the gun off, and the timing had been perfect. Crag threw himself at the guy standing in front of me like a line-backer, dropping the bearded hunter. “Get the stone!” he yelled.

  I let the gun fall, got up, and sprinted through the wind, sliding between Crag and the hunter—who had already regained his footing—and continuing on my run to reach the stone. Its power was getting stronger, and if I was feeling it, I could only imagine what the others were going through. Another cut opened across my cheek as I approached, then another along my ribs. They were thin, fine cuts, just deep enough to bleed and cause a great deal of pain, but not enough to drop me. Crag, though, had been covered in cuts, and even though he looked more like rock than man, he was still very much bleeding.

  The stone was ahead of me now; a small, black rock filled with swirling violet and orange light, sitting on a stone podium that seemed to be rising up from the very ground like a withered, black hand to cradle it. The closer I got, the louder the voices in my mind were able to scream. I couldn’t hear myself think.

  Taking a series of deep breaths, knowing full well touching this thing could kill me, I reached for the stone. It was like shoving my hand into a shredder. Red lesions appeared on my skin, my own blood spraying onto the floor and into the snow around me. I flinched, pulling my hand away and cradling my injured flesh, wincing from the white-hot pain pulsing through it.

  Behind me I could hear bursts of rifle fire starting to go off, people were shouting, their voices being chewed up by the wind. I didn’t know how much time I had, but I was the only one who could do this—no one else even dared get as close to the stone as I did.

  Clenching my jaw, I grit my teeth against the pain that was surely about to hit me like a ton of bricks. With a deep breath held in my lungs, I reached for the stone with my other hand, and before I could even register just how badly I was being cut up, I grabbed hold of it.

  An explosion of sound rocked my mind. It was like I’d been partially deaf all my life, and now I could all of a sudden hear the torrent of screaming, and crying, and angry yelling. I couldn’t understand some of the voices, but I could understand others because, impossibly, there were Aevian words being thrown into my mind. But they were vicious words, vulgar words, whatever was yelling them was clearly in a lot of pain, and he wanted to inflict that pain on someone else, anyone else, everyone else.

  More cuts started crisscrossing around my hand, and even more still started crawling along my arm, ripping through my suit like it was nothing to get to the soft flesh underneath. Soon, I was being cut all over, I was bleeding all over, pain ripping through me like an electrifying rush to the point where eventually, just as the corners of my vision darkened, I started to almost feel numb to the pain.

  Until, finally, I was entirely numb to it. The screaming had stopped, the cries for help had stopped, the vitriol being hurled at me in my own native tongue had stopped. My hand was red with blood, there were cuts along my face, my abdomen, my legs, and my feet like I’d fallen through a garbage disposal unit and come out the other side still alive, but no new cuts were appearing on my body, no new flowers of pain were opening up, and as I ground my teeth to protect myself from falling unconscious, I found a moment of peace and strength, enough to speak.

  “Wh—wh…” my throat was working, but the words struggled like caught breaths, until, “We need to go!” I yelled.

  I had the stone in my hand and somehow, I knew, as long as I held it, the stone’s power was contained within me. If I were to let it go, though, the chaos and anger vibrating within it would erupt all over again.

  Crag approached, bounding toward me like a literal boulder with legs. I’d never seen him like this, his true form; a rocky exterior marked with lines of blood between the cracks. He grabbed me by the waist and hauled me over his shoulder.

  Around us, I saw Elrik and Greyson beginning to create a perimeter; Elrik firing blindly with his rifle into the wind, while Greyson dragged the unconscious man closer toward us. Draven then leapt between them, his massive, black wings beating powerfully to keep him steady despite the incredible gales at the eye of the magic storm we were in. He turned to face Crag and me, reached into his coat pocket, and tossed the teleportation orb into the air where it hovered, then exploded to create the portal we could use to get back home.

  “Yes, run!” came the bearded hunter’s voice echoing all around us, “Run, little rats. Your Fortress won’t protect you from Corax and the Crimson Hunters—you have been marked!”

  Crag didn’t care to throw a retort into the wind, instead he made sure he had a good grip on me and charged headlong into the portal. After a moment of disorientation, spat us out into a dark room. “Light!” he bellowed, and sconces set into black, stone walls fired up around us, shedding light on the chamber we were in.

  At the end of the chamber I saw a platform that looked exactly like the last one Crag had shown me, where the other, amber singing stone was being kept. He rushed me toward it, set me down in front of it, and without hesitating, I pushed the stone between the pillars—one hanging from the ceili
ng, one rising from the ground—and opened my palm.

  The stone slipped from my grip and hovered, as if caught by an invisible hand. I couldn’t hear the screaming anymore, but Crag groaned and covered his ears. Pain—new, fresh pain—ripped through me and I groaned with the earth Elemental, but he was able to grab me, rush me down the hall, and get us through the door on the other side of it before he collapsed, bringing me down with him.

  It took every ounce of strength I had left in me, but I fought to get to my feet, grinding my teeth against the pain and grunting loudly, but I threw my weight behind the huge door and pushed until it shut. The locks engaged automatically, and a brilliant display of flowery, silver lines crawled along the door’s surface, bathing me with light and keeping the stone’s magic from hurting me any more than I already was.

  I collapsed as I watched, exhausted, but someone was there to catch me.

  No, not someone.

  Draven.

  Draven had me scooped in his arms, and all I could smell was him. I had my nose buried against his chest as my tenuous hold on consciousness began to slip. We were moving fast through dark halls, the soft, orange glow from torches set into the walls barely registering to me as little more than pulses of radiance, until we weren’t running anymore, but flying.

  I could feel the wind in my hair, against my battered and cut up body, each of the bleeding cuts against my skin screeching from the cold. I wrapped my arms around his neck more tightly, groaning from the pain. Draven was talking, but I couldn’t hear him over the rush of wind. Maybe he was telling me to fight, to stay conscious, or maybe he was telling me to suck it up and quit whining—both were entirely possible.

  I can hear his heart, I thought as he carried me through the air, his huge black wings thumping hard, carrying us both high above the Black Fortress’ grounds, until finally he landed on a balcony. Draven shouldered his way into a dark room, called for Siren to appear, and then moved me quickly through another door into a room I remembered having been brought to once.