by C. E. Murphy
The dead men caught me.
Cold surged through my body as though life itself tried to flee from their unfeeling hands. My shields flared, and the one part of my mind that wasn’t gibbering with fear shut them down. I was balanced precariously on rickety arms whose ropy black muscle held me out of the cauldron. The last thing I wanted to do was make those arms burst into flames.
They didn’t speak, the dead, but they moved together. Three tiny sways, and then a good heave-ho sent me tumbling away from the cauldron and toward Redding’s swimming pool. I hit the concrete edge with my face and tasted blood, but given that I’d been expecting to taste untimely doom, blood was pretty nice.
Behind me, the distinctive note of metal leaving leather hissed. I clenched every muscle in my body and tried to flip myself over, pissed off at the idea of being stabbed in the back at this late date. I almost made it, too, but a booted foot caught me in the back of my ribs and kept me on my stomach. A wordless yell broke from my throat, and for all that it was muffled by the gag, it at least felt like the kind of thing a fighter should go out on. It was angry, full of defiance, ready to face whatever the fates had in store.
It was also a completely inappropriate response to the ropes binding me being slashed apart by someone else’s blade.
My hands flopped to the ground and my feet smashed downward, thunking into the lawn that bordered the swimming pool’s patio. I’d pushed blood back into my system, but actual non-magically-assisted blood flow let me know just how inadequate my efforts had been. Good enough to let me grab the rapier, but not nearly good enough to keep pins and needles that felt like pitons and spikes from driving into my extremities. I lay there for a few seconds just gasping with pain, unable to even care that my back was exposed to a bunch of presumably murderous corpses.
Once that thought worked itself through my over-oxygenated brain, I rolled over on my back and lifted my rapier in a feeble defense. The five warriors who’d taken me down stood in a loose circle, and Redding was caught in the midst of his phalanx, shouting furiously. Apparently they didn’t consider him their general, because they stayed where they were, watching their mates, who were watching me. Waiting for me to do something. After a while I realized what it was.
They wanted a fair fight.
I yanked the gag out of my mouth, spat bile and jumped to my feet. My feet protested this treatment with a shriek of agony, and I had a brief dazzling image of Petite’s brake pads going. Replacing brakes took a while, time I didn’t have, so I slammed the idea of a little extra brake lube through my system and the dancing anguish faded. I didn’t really need new brakes. I just needed to not fall down while I took on undead warriors in man-to-man combat.
All five of the semi-circle of fighters moved forward at once, as one. I guessed they didn’t want a totally fair fight. On the other hand, I’d torched one of them already, so maybe me against nine wasn’t such bad odds. Especially since I only had to stay alive about six more minutes and the witching hour would be ended.
Teeth bared in a grin, rapier aglow with life magic, I fell into a fencing stance and for the second time that day, lifted a hand to say bring it on.
Archie Redding threw his sacrificial knife and caught me in the belly.
CHAPTER 27
I had learned something during the break-neck three days in January when my shamanic talents had awakened from their slumber. Well, I’d learned quite a few things, but the relevant one right now was this:
Getting a knife in the gut really hurts. I’d done it twice then, both times in fights with Cernunnos. It turned out having a mortal, or semi-mortal, human being wielding the blade didn’t make it hurt one little tiny bit less at all. My vision went black, because going white seemed like too much effort. It was already dark out, after all. Pain didn’t have to go very far to turn everything to swimming, blinding darkness. It wasn’t quite a mortal injury sort of darkness—I’d had those, and this was different—but it was very calm and very reassuring and very easy. Easier than I thought it should be, which I blamed on the presence of the cauldron. It took everything I had to draw in a breath, and even doing that brought a host of regrets.
The knife moved in my belly. I honestly couldn’t decide if it would be better to take it out and start bleeding, or if I should leave it in and hope I didn’t cut myself up more while I fought undead warriors. I was pretty certain that either way they weren’t going to give me the time to heal myself. This was not a three-second repair job, not any more than rewelding a torn door or hood would be a quick fix.
I pulled the knife out before I let myself think about it anymore. While I was doing that, I realized I wasn’t wearing my Kevlar vest anymore. Not that it mattered: it was meant to stop bullets, not knives. Edged weapons had a whole different manner of entry. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing I should’ve lost. Redding must’ve taken it off me before suspending me over the cauldron. I hoped I was right about zombies not using guns.
Focusing on the missing vest in no way stopped the world turning white and spinning violently. I supposed it always did the latter, but I wasn’t usually intimately aware of it. I couldn’t clear my vision, so I reached for the Sight, and found it more fragile and uncertain than I was accustomed to. Still, it gave me shadows, and that was more than I could see with my normal eyes.
Redding’s face was split in another of those saintly smiles. He gave me an encouraging nod: encouraging me to die, I imagined, so he could throw me in the cauldron. His bodyguards didn’t look happy, though I wasn’t sure what happy looked like on a dead man. My five warriors were still standing there, though they’d lifted their swords now, and I was pretty sure I could either start fighting or just get cut down.
Fighting seemed better. I was Inigo Montoya. I wasn’t going to let my guts spill out on the ground while the six-fingered man got away. I stuffed my left hand against my belly, admiring how the world swam red, and raised the rapier with my right. It wobbled, but at least it offered some kind of defense. I wished I had a wall to lean against, but I didn’t think the swimming pool would suddenly become a solid vertical surface at my whim.
The cauldron warriors moved in, and did it like bats out of hell. None of this sluggish-zombie routine for them, oh no. They could move fast enough to keep me from falling into the cauldron, and they could sure as hell move fast enough to look like emaciated death swooping down on me. A sword glittered in my Sight, cutting the air on its way to doing the same to my neck. I made an absolutely pathetic parry and silver skittered away. A tiny wellspring of hope opened in my chest. Maybe I could beat them after all.
A much larger wellspring of blood opened in my left shoulder as one of the others drove his sword into it. A raw yell that was more surprise than pain tore my throat, and red film poured through my vision, blocking out the Sight. The pain in my gut faded, and my nerves never got a chance to tell me how much the wound in my shoulder hurt.
Glorious, savage power rushed into me like I was drawing it from the earth. My eyes cleared, though everything remained tainted a dangerous crimson. I whipped around, totally uncaring that I was exposing my back to half the undead soldiers, and shoved my rapier hilt deep into the one who’d stuck my shoulder. His jaw dropped open in a fair impression of astonishment, and I jerked upward with my sword, severing the monster’s breastbone and continuing toward the sky.
I did not have the strength to do that. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got decent upper-body strength from working on cars, and I had a noticeable height advantage over the undead guy. Moreover, his bones were probably a little fragile, since death wasn’t usually good for structural integrity. And the rapier, while basically a stabbing weapon, did have an edged blade all the way to the crossguard. Still, these things did not make for splitting a body from the sternum up.
It felt awesome. Blazing blue magic roared along my rapier and exploded into my opponent, shattering what little of his body wasn’t already cut in half. Beneath the sound of ancient flesh ripping apart, I
heard another whisper of sound, and twisted to slam my sword into another soldier’s oncoming blow. My teeth bared themselves in a bloody grin, taste of iron burning my mouth. Intellectually I knew that couldn’t be good, but what I thought of as my intellect had largely gone to cower in a corner while I went medieval on a bunch of zombie asses.
My opponent gave me a rictus of a grin in return, undead gaze flickering over my shoulder in a classic feint. I swept my blade around, knocking his aside, recovered from my lunge and flung my left hand behind me to catch an oncoming blow with my palm. It hurt. It had to hurt, but that was like saying the sky had to be blue above the clouds: I knew it was true, but when rain poured down from the heavens, it didn’t matter. The soldier drew his blade back, destroying the muscle and tendons of my fingers along the way.
I hissed and decided the risk of using magic as a deliberate weapon was worth it just then. My sword burned with righteous healing power that meant a quick end to the zombie warriors, and showed no signs of petering. Maybe the magic just hadn’t liked being used against a god. Or maybe I was about to make the last mistake of my life, but at least it’d be a good show.
The first soldier hadn’t been disarmed, just knocked off balance. He came at me again. I ducked under his sword—no mean trick, given I had at least six inches on the guy—and came up inside his guard for another through-the-sternum hit. He exploded. I jerked around, raising my useless left hand and calling power that burst from my palm tinted red with rage.
My third opponent flew back across the swimming pool, into a hedge, and lit on fire. Interestingly—even in the blur of action and anger that propelled me, it was interesting—only he burned, not the sticky black branches that held him. And the silver-white magic filling me didn’t burn away or leave me exhausted. It seemed there were things I could throw it at without suffering ill effects myself.
The last two of my set came at me from opposite sides. I ducked and swung around behind the one to my right, nailing him in the neck as he collided with his friend. It looked very Three Stooges, right up to and including my sword sticking in the one’s spinal cord. Gooey flesh burned away under the blade’s healing power, but not fast enough for me to shake it loose, even with the preternatural strength that washed through my veins. I howled frustration and let the sword go as the fifth and final of my attackers ran at me. My plan, such as it was, was to let him run the sword through me and throttle him when he tried to pull it out, but my body was smarter than my brain. At the last possible instant I took a small step to the side and thrust my arm in front of his chest, clotheslining him.
He went down with a surfeit of grace, sword flying in an elegant arc as his arms lifted toward the sky. I pounced on him, grabbed his throat with my one good hand and poured healing power into his desiccated shell. Like his brothers, he simply exploded, spattering bits of dried-up viscera all over the yard. I could get to like that. Triumphant, I jumped to my feet, snatched up my sword—and toppled as the entire world came rushing in at my head like a planet-bashing asteroid.
I stuffed the rapier into the ground so I had something to lean on. There were body parts all around me, black and smoking with their severed ends glowing silver-blue. Pride, and then mind-boggling agony, bloomed in my chest. I fumbled my utterly useless left hand toward the hole in my shoulder, which was way too much to ask of my injured body. I tried for the other hole, the one in my gut, and couldn’t manage that, either. Stymied, I dropped to my knees, right hand wrapped around the rapier’s pommel, and looked up.
I’d thought berserker rages were supposed to ignore all injury and wait until the battle was over to give way to hurting. Apparently mine hadn’t gone to Berserker Rage Finishing School, because I had nothing, not one single goddamn thing, left. I couldn’t even muster up a whimper: it took too much energy. Blasting Cernunnos had wiped me out, too. Maybe I was paying for using healing magic offensively, after all.
On the other hand, maybe I was just paying for having a bunch of holes in my previously unperforated body. My left hand was doing something worse than throbbing. Hot wetness drained from it without any particular surcease or increase as accorded by the beat of my heart. Blood leaked from my shoulder, too, a semi-enthusiastic drizzle that I doubted could keep up the enthusiasm much longer. Finding out what my belly was doing meant looking down. I was reasonably certain I would never look up again if I did that, so I kept my gaze resolutely fixed on Redding and his bodyguards.
The latter four stepped away from Redding and moved toward me, loosening their swords in their sheathes. A groan tried to break free, but gave it up as a bad job somewhere around my esophagus. If I didn’t have the energy to groan, I was pretty sure I didn’t have the strength to fight off four more undead warriors. I set my teeth together carefully, mimicry of a clenched jaw that I hoped would inspire resolution within me.
It didn’t, really. It didn’t even inspire a rally of healing magic, which was apparently as exhausted as I was. I held on to my sword, dug deep in my gut for power, and took the one choice I thought still lay open to me.
I waited until they were close enough to flash-fry with my shields, and let loose with everything I had left.
Magic made the fssht! sound of a candle being doused with water and collapsed inside of me without even the faintest external flare. I went after it in a slow luxurious fall, the rapier no longer enough to hold me up.
The last clear thing I saw was four blades rising to take my life, and the Wild Hunt, accompanied by Suzanne Quinley, Gary Muldoon, Billy Holliday and Captain Michael Morrison, pouring out of the sky to override Redding’s backyard like a bunch of kids playing at cowboys.
When I stepped between planes of existence, the one I was in tended to be all-consuming, whether it was my garden or the Dead Zone or a visit to the Upper and Lower Worlds that made up the trifecta of which the earth was the center. I had, once or twice, stepped out of my body and remained in the normal world, but my consciousness had gone with the spiritual version of myself, rather than the physical. I hadn’t ever learned to see in two versions of reality at once, maybe because it had never been necessary.
I learned real goddamn quick right then, because there was no way I was gonna miss this.
My garden was by far the clearer of the two realities I stood in. It was like the diner all over again, with my disembodied emotional self kneeling above a mangled idea of my body. I knew what I was doing this time, which was both good and awful: a girl shouldn’t have to patch up god-awful wounds like the ones I’d sustained once in a lifetime, much less two or three times. We were talking major bodywork, and to my huge relief, the magic wasn’t gone. It just apparently didn’t think blasting zombies was as important as surviving. It responded easily to my garden-self’s ministrations, and on a distant level I felt the screaming pain in my hand ease.
All of that was secondary in my interests to watching the home team kick the hell out of a zombie army.
Okay, it was a very small army, what with only four of them being left standing, but the Hunt itself wheeled away once it had deposited my friends across Redding’s back lawn. Even though I thought it’d be helpful to have a god on Morrison’s side, if Redding or that cauldron had drawn the Hunt in, I really couldn’t blame them for getting out of there as fast as they could. We puny mortals would only lose a lifetime, if we were thrown in the cauldron. A god and his Riders would lose eternity. Even if I wanted Cernunnos to help my friends, I could easily see how that price would be too high.
Besides, it wasn’t like I was in any condition to stop him.
Morrison had ridden with the god himself, both of them on the liquid-silver stallion and both of them wearing near-identical grins of fury. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what had convinced Morrison to ride with the Hunt, but he looked comfortable on the stallion right up until the moment he dived off its wide back. He hit the ground in a roll and came to his feet less than a yard from one of the zombies, his duty weapon at the fore. I saw six flashes of light
from the gun’s muzzle, though I didn’t hear a thing, and the undead monster collapsed with a skull full of lead.
Gary’d ridden with the bearded king, and Billy with the archer. Suzy was with her uncle, the boy Rider, and all three of the mortal passengers flung themselves away from their inhuman hosts in the brief space of time it took Morrison to wipe out the warrior he’d faced. Gary smashed into another one with a flying tackle. This time I heard something: bone popping and cracking as his weight made a ruin of an already ancient body. He rolled to his feet as easily as Morrison had, breaking into a run, and skidded to a stop beside me.
Love and joy and all sorts of other gooshy things welled up in my chest. My God, I had good friends. I’d have never expected him to take time to check on me, not in the midst of chaotic battle. Tears blurred my already-poor vision and fell over the bridge of my nose to seep into the ground. I wanted to smile, but I was still too tired. That didn’t matter: the up-swell of emotion actually breathed new life into my power, and the garden version of myself sparked with relief and grim triumph. My breathing eased. I could still feel wrongness in my belly, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.
Gary, my savior, my friend, my hero and my protector, yanked my still-glowing rapier from the earth, thundered back to the zombie he’d broken and began hacking it to pieces.
Every drop of romanticism and foolhardy joy went flat and wry within me. I mean, I had to hand it to him, that was a smart move, but it shot the shit out of my sails. A snicker bubbled up from somewhere inside me, which seemed like a positive sign, and I moved my head a little to get a better view of the rest of the fight. That I could was an even better sign.
Billy’d gone the same route Morrison had: he’d emptied a clip into one of the zombies, and stood over it with his gun at the ready, daring the thing to move again. It was normal, it was human, it was the expected response.