by Nazri Noor
“Sterling,” I shouted. “Get out of the – ”
Thea was always fast. The spear left her hand, soaring like a rocket, slamming into Sterling’s chest and throwing him off his feet. He screamed, clutching at the beam of solid light piercing his torso, struggling.
At least he wasn’t dead. That was the only consolation. Maybe Thea missed his heart. But this was my opportunity. I slashed Vanitas in a wide arc, aiming for her head. Thea lifted her hand again, her fingers supporting a shield crafted magically out of solid light.
I twisted my strike at the last moment, catching her at the wrist.
The slash severed her hand. I watched with dark satisfaction as it landed in the grass at her feet, fingers twitching, talons raking at the earth. Thea screamed, her eyes widening at the stream of thick, black blood dripping from the stump that was once her arm.
Then she locked eyes with me. Her horror turned into glee, and her screams warped into piercing laughter.
Chapter 28
I looked on in revulsion as the meat of Thea’s stump began to move. Sinew and muscle wriggled like little black worms, knitting and stitching even as she laughed. Bones erupted in slivers from the weaves of her ebony flesh, providing structure for her fingers.
Thea raised her hand in my face as a perfect layer of alabaster skin formed over it. Every finger looked pristine. New.
“What have you done to yourself, Thea? What are you now?”
She smiled, her fangs glinting in the starlight. “Better. Stronger. More powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
“This isn’t power, Thea. It’s madness. The Eldest will warp you the way they warp all of their servants.”
She laughed even louder, raising her talons to stroke at her cheek, as if both appraising and displaying her beauty. “I am not warped, Dustin Graves. I am a thing perfected.”
“No. You’re just insane.”
“Insane? What is insane, Dustin, is forfeiting a portion of your freedom in exchange for something that is dead.” Her eye fell upon my hand, upon Vanitas. “You bargained with a demon prince to bring back this weathered relic? How sentimental of you.”
“You’re one to talk. You’re still on your ridiculous crusade to bring back your children.”
I thought I caught the flash of anger in Thea’s face, but when she spoke again, her voice was even thicker with mockery.
“That seems entirely reasonable to me, Dustin. What wouldn’t you give to bring your loved ones back? Your family?”
My blood ran cold as her lips curved into a smile.
“What wouldn’t you give to bring back your mother?”
The battle whirled around us. We were the eye of the cyclone, but every passing second, every word Thea spoke only stirred the storm in my heart. The Dark Room banged against its door. One thought, and I could kill her.
“She always did have a fascination for occult novelties, for strange antiques, your mother. All I did was sell her a box of trinkets. It was a simple matter of experimentation. With so much star-metal near her, I wondered, would the corruption take? Would her mortal body become fused with the energies of the Eldest?”
“You poisoned her. No human can take being close to that much corruption. We thought it was cancer. You killed my mother.” I gritted my teeth, my vision blurring with tears, my palm stinging as I gripped Vanitas’s hilt harder and harder. “Is that why you sacrificed me? Is that why you put your dagger in my heart, to test if I was the right subject for your insane plan?”
“Oh, it would have been glorious. If only you’d stuck it out with me, Dustin. If only the gem I placed around your throat could have truly controlled your mind. Imagine, me, an avatar of the Eldest themselves, and you, their greatest warrior, a thing that walks in the skin of a man, driven by the very darkest forces of the universe.”
“I’m not your plaything, Thea. I don’t belong to the Eldest. I don’t belong to you. I can fight what you’ve made me. I won’t turn into the monster that you are.”
She tilted her head. “Oh. Is that so? These brothers of yours, the homunculi. I could see through their eyes, every step of the way. And I saw the look on your face when you killed the homunculus in the forest. The one that attacked your father.” Thea smiled, her teeth glinting like daggers. “I saw the satisfaction in your eyes when you snuffed the life out of something that wore your face. Don’t you feel it, Dustin? The thrill of murder. The sheer joy of taking something in your hand, and crushing it until it starts bleeding. Until it stops breathing.”
But she was right. The urge to kill had become more and more difficult to resist, and my impulse to hurt and to slaughter had only grown stronger since the day I’d awakened to my powers. But I could control that. I was human, I told myself. I was Dustin Graves, a mage, a shadowcrafter. Someone’s son.
“I’m nothing like you,” I muttered.
“No. Of course not. And fortunately, for the sake of my experiment, you were nothing like your mother, either.”
“Don’t talk about her. I’ll fucking kill you. I swear I’ll – ”
Sterling leapt out of the darkness in a flurry of fangs and claws, his fingers extended as they reached for Thea. She held up one hand – and caught him by the throat.
“Dust,” Sterling shouted. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”
But Thea – Thea had always been fast.
A gout of yellow brilliance roared out of her palm. This wasn’t one of her light spears, not one of the weapons she could summon out of thin air. It was warm, familiar, bright. Sunlight. She’d shot him, point blank, with a massive burst of sunlight. Sterling screamed, and screamed.
The tattered remains of his body – the tangles of bone that still had his flesh clinging to them – rattled as they fell to the ground. Half of his skin, muscle, and organs had been charred into cinders. His face remained miraculously intact, but not much else was. His eyes stared glassily at the moon, his mouth open, unmoving. Something icy gripped its fingers around my heart.
“Sterling. No. You killed him.”
“Undead filth,” Thea said, dusting off her hands.
“No more,” I shouted. “No more deaths. This is over.”
Thea spread her hands. “Then end it, if you can.”
I screamed as I charged at her, my heart thick with fury, my blood singing for vengeance. Vanitas’s hilt grew warm and slick in my hand. Blood. The Dark Room had come before I’d even thought to summon it. Bursting from the ground, twelve black spears of solid night pierced Thea’s body. She gasped, but did not falter.
“You tried that once before and didn’t kill me, Dustin. End it. End it, you pitiful coward.”
With both hands I raised Vanitas over my shoulder, rearing back with all the strength I needed to puncture Thea’s armor. And with a great roar I thrust the sword forward, watching with berserk relish as the blade pierced her chitin, then sank into her flesh, searching through her chest. When Vanitas met her heart, I felt it beat. I felt it tremble.
Thea gasped, her head thrown back. Black blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. I pushed. Harder, and harder, until I knew that Vanitas had penetrated Thea from stem to stern. The compound eyes of an insect stared at me, passive, yet analytical. I stared back, unable to comprehend the alien insanity of the woman that was once Thea Morgana. The pillar of light above us wavered, then vanished. The shrike attack was finished.
“Your last words, Thea,” I whispered. “Say them now. It’s over.”
Her eyes rolled down to stare me full in the face. “Do you remember,” she croaked, “when I used your blood to commune with the Eldest? When I told you that I needed your blood at its sweetest, the fruit of your talent at its ripest?”
I scowled, then twisted the blade harder. She choked. “What are you talking about?”
“One of our first lessons at the Lorica, Dustin. A communion must always come with an offering.”
Thea’s gaze fell to the ground. The pile of artifacts the homunculi s
tole. Wasn’t that her offering? But there they were, planted in the earth among the relics and trinkets. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed them before: two gravestones, small ones, that might have belonged to children.
My blood ran cold.
Thea wrapped her hands around Vanitas, her fingers pulling the verdigris sword deeper and deeper into her body. She trembled, grimacing in agony, and she lifted her mouth to the witnessing stars, the blood trickling down her chin.
“I offer myself to the Eldest.”
Chapter 29
Vanitas, the verdigris daggers, the chest of horrors left behind by my mother. All this time Thea was only waiting for her powers to grow, for her connection to the Eldest to mature, to make herself the greatest sacrifice there was. For how better could a priest of the Eldest serve her masters than by surrendering her very existence?
I don’t know when Thea decided to give up on capturing me again and using my blood for her rituals. I don’t know how she discovered that the watered-down blood of my homunculi was rich enough for inscribing the circle, yet not enough to offer as sacrifice. All I knew was that the heavens were screaming, twin beams of light lancing through the stars and the sky, each of them seeking one of the little gravestones on the hill.
Thea released Vanitas, then toppled backwards, the sword slipping out of her torso as she fell. She slumped to the ground, motionless. I felt no triumph, no satisfaction. We’d slain one threat, but all I had truly done was complete her ritual for her.
The shrikes had vanished, but so had the homunculi. The grass was thick with smears of blood, both black and red. Across the hill, Asher was sprawled on all fours, retching from the vast expenditure of his power. From somewhere behind me I could hear Carver calling my name. But above it all, what I really heard was the wailing.
Two voices, screaming, howling, from beneath the earth. Two children. The ground rumbled.
I ran for it.
“Dustin, to my side,” Carver yelled. You can bet I dashed straight for him. Whatever was happening, an entire localized earthquake – and the horrific subterranean shrieking? Not good omens at all. “Steel yourselves. The worst is still to come.”
But I wondered if we even had any fight left between us. Asher was still bent double, drenched in cold sweat. Gil remained in his wolf form, crouched by the edge of the hill, snarling and growling at something the rest of us couldn’t see. And Sterling – God but I know that it’s callous, but it was best for me not to think of what had happened to Sterling just then. We needed everything we had to fight. There was no time for grieving.
The little gravestones tumbled over, and the earth of the hilltop split apart, scarring as the first set of massive white talons burst from out of the ground. Each talon was the size of a human forearm, all of them sprouting from limbs as thick as telephone poles.
My mouth parched, I looked on in horror as more of those limbs erupted from the earth, scattering the soil as they lifted their bearers out of their graves, their bodies bulbous and fleshy, glistening in some awful, slick fluid. Two of these creatures, each the size of a small truck, finally freed themselves from their former homes. Each had the body of a huge, writhing maggot. Each raked its spear-like claws and long, spindly arms at the air.
And each bore the head of a young, long-dead child.
“Her children,” Carver muttered. “She finally did it. She brought them back to life.”
And at what cost? This was exactly as Bastion told me all that time ago, and exactly as Carver predicted. The Eldest have no loyalty, no understanding of mercy or human emotion, and even the wishes granted to their servants would be corrupted, perverted beyond recognition.
The two abominations, one with the head of a boy, the other, a girl, shrieked and wailed, both from their human mouths and from the multitude of tooth-lined gashes ripped into their heaving bodies.
“My babies.”
I didn’t think that Thea had survived. Yet with twelve gaping holes in her body, and a thirteenth punched through her heart, she was still moving, crawling on her hands and knees towards the bellowing monstrosities that were once her own offspring.
They turned to her with unseeing eyes, the heads of the two children bowing as they spotted the woman writhing in a pool of her own blood. But they turned away again, uncaring, showing no signs of recognition, no memory of the thing that was once their mother.
“My babies,” Thea croaked, and something within my chest twisted.
I detested the very thought of feeling any sympathy for the woman who had murdered not just me, but my mother. Yet my heart still seized with foreboding when another beam of light slammed into the earth, only feet away from Thea’s ragged body.
“No,” she said, her head swinging from her children, to the pillar, and back again. “Please, no,” she wailed, pleading to some unseen force. “I’ve only just brought them back. Time.” She staggered to her feet, clutching at the holes in her belly, loping for her corrupted brood. “Please. Give me time.”
A single black tentacle the size of a tree ripped out of the pillar of light, tearing through the veil between realities with a deafening crack.
Not this, I thought. The last thing we needed was another monstrosity to fight.
But the thing hadn’t come for us. Thea’s eyes went wide as the tentacle shot straight for her body. She screamed as it curled around her waist, dragging her towards the gateway. Her talons tore into the earth, digging great furrows as she fought to stay in our world, as she fought to be with her children once more.
“No,” she screamed. “Please. No.”
I’d never heard Thea so frightened. I’d never heard anyone so terrified. Her screams pealed through the night as the tentacle dragged her through the rift. The beam of light winked out into nothing, and just like that, Thea Morgana was gone.
But there was still the matter of her children.
Another howl tore through the graveyard, and before we could even think to coordinate, Gil had already raced across the hill, launching himself at the closest of the abominations. He was a roaring missile, jaws gnashing and frothing – but I couldn’t even begin to think where he could attack the beasts and hope to slow them down, much less stop them.
He smashed into the monster, tearing at its belly with his claws. The beast reared back, lifted its own spindly, spear-like talons, and struck. Gil yelped like a kicked dog, stumbling into the earth, his fur matted and slick. Blood dripped from the awful gashes carved across his chest.
“Fuck,” I said, raking at my hair. “Oh, fuck. Gil, oh fuck.”
Carver tugged on my shoulder. “Dustin. The artifacts.”
That’s right. I’d forgotten about them, the entire pile still littering the ground between the gravestones. But the abominations had set their eyes upon us, and were moving with an awful, unholy speed, wriggling like great worms across the grass.
Worse, they were growing. God, but I hadn’t imagined it. By some horrible twist the Eldest had given these monsters a form of cellular acceleration. It had started slowly enough, but between climbing out of the earth and attacking Gil, each of Thea’s children had nearly doubled in size. Who knew how large they could become? And if they set their sights on Valero –
“We need to stop them. They’re getting bigger, Carver.”
“That hasn’t escaped my notice. It will take most of my energy, but I should be able to trigger a detonation using the arcane power stored within the stolen artifacts. I’ll need your help in this, Dustin.”
“Okay,” I stammered, forcing myself to calm down. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”
“I’ll need you to shadowstep among the children, to distract them while I work.”
“Come again? I think I misheard you there.”
“You heard me right the first time,” he growled. “And I’ll need you to hold them in place. Use your blades, the way you would pin insects to a board.”
Or the way I’d done so with Amaterasu, and with Thea that same ni
ght. Use my blades like an iron maiden. That part? No sweat. I just needed to bleed half my body out to get the job done. The thing about distracting the beasts, though?
“Do it,” Carver snarled.
I had no choice. We were the only ones left standing, and if I had to act as the decoy, then so be it. I walked into the shadows, traversing through the Dark Room. The mists were even more excitable, as if being used twice in the same night hadn’t been enough for them.
They tumbled in the darkness, snaking tentacles and shadowy fingers over my skin, my cheeks. I might have imagined it, but it felt as if one of the tendrils reached for the wetness in my wounded palm, between my fingers, lapping at my blood.
I emerged in the graveyard, putting the pile of artifacts between myself and the pair of abominations. The smell of freshly turned earth grew thick in my lungs as I breathed. “Over here,” I shouted, whirling Vanitas over my head as I did, his garnets and tarnished gold flashing in the night.
Thea’s children howled as they caught sight of me, their human faces contorting into deranged masks of both hunger and hate, the dozens of mouths in their bodies baying for my blood. Slobbering and slithering, they wriggled towards me, towards the artifacts. Not one of them noticed when their bulbous, gelatinous bodies consumed their own gravestones as they approached.
I didn’t hesitate. I slammed my palm into the earth, driving my intention into the shadows, to bring forth enough blades and spikes and spears to hold Thea’s children in place. And this time I didn’t need to cut myself open, either.
The Dark Room did that work for me, claiming its payment through the wounds that opened across my skin, in particular the one that ripped open over my heart. I grimaced against the pain, chuckling from deep in my throat. If Asher and Carver didn’t have anything left over to heal me after this was said and done, I hoped that they’d at least have the strength to bury me.