“I made my family swear that they wouldn’t come and visit. If I ask them to come now, I’ll never be able to get them to leave,” Carter said.
“So you’re going to skip calling the cavalry because you don’t want helicopter parents?” Antoinette asked.
“You haven’t met my parents. They make helicopter parents seem like apathetic stoners. Plus, they don’t drive, and the radio just said that the National Guard has blocked off all bridges and tunnels into the city. Shit is getting extremely real.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Just saw it on Twitter.” Carter held up his phone.
“How is that? Twitter can tell you that the radio told you all of New York is closed down?” I asked.
“Twitter knows pretty much everything, Jake,” Antoinette said.
“And here I am trying to learn things from books. Obsolesced by a technology that sounds like a euphemism for infatuation,” I said.
“Don’t feel too bad. If we all die, it won’t matter!” Nate said, with what I hoped was sarcastic enthusiasm.
“Well, there is that,” Carter said. A strap he was rethreading tore, causing the section of armor to fall apart. “Shit.”
The butler reappeared with tea and coffee, and we availed ourselves of caffeine, with the unspoken understanding that it was going to be a very long day.
Celestial alignment would indicate that Esther needed to move soon, especially since she’d need to complete the ritual, travel to the Deeps to open the gate that contained the fetal god, and then coax it up and out into the surface world. Which meant that she was due at Clinton Castle anytime.
But the longer she waited, the more power she could be amassing. Every minute that passed, she could be getting stronger, reaping the energy necessary for the impossible workings that had effectively turned the NYPD’s semiautomatic weapons into cap guns.
I paced, drank coffee, and laid down several layers of protection, adding what power I could to Carter’s armor and to Antoinette’s protective necklace. I borrowed Nate’s bracelet long enough to apply an attention-eliding charm, hoping that it would draw Esther’s focus away from the fifth and final Bearer. I did not have much faith in the enchantment’s efficaciousness, but after a third straight hour of no attack, I was sufficiently fidgety to do something, anything, just to feel useful.
Sometime during my fourth cup of coffee, an ear-piercing alarm rang out, bringing the four of us to our feet.
Vittorio’s voice came through a PA I hadn’t known was there.
“Four bogies, front entrance. No visual on Greene. All available personnel to the foyer.”
That was us. I nodded to Nate, who made his way to join the Gardener in his ritual space–cum–panic room.
The doors were still intact when we arrived in the foyer, joining the four designer-bodysuited guards that watched the front door with three-quarters cover of hard corners.
The foyer had double doors that opened into a narrow initial corridor, which immediately widened to fifty feet wide. The first pair were there, weapons trained on the door. The room continued with a lustrous carpet leading deeper into the house and to a split grand staircase. The other two guards stood at the top of the staircase, where the wrought-iron railing became a solid work with a mural of the garden of Eden bas-relief in iron, providing the guards cover.
We stood on the carpet, then fanned out. Antoinette and I took our places at the top of the stairs, mostly protected by the bas-relief, while Carter stood in the exact center of the room.
“Are you quite sure you don’t want to even try to seek cover?” I asked.
“Cover is what stands between me and stabbing things,” he said by way of response.
Let it not be said to my resident assistant that I constrained my roommate. He was his own man. Even if that man was insane at times.
The door rattled, shaking on its hinges. From outside, I heard a high-pitched scream, but not the sort born of a human. Gunfire followed in tight bursts.
“Exterior guard has engaged the enemy. Stand by.”
My wards on the front entrance were tied to the threshold itself, and would keep both Esther and me from being able to cross the plane of the castle.
The doors slammed again, and I flinched before catching myself. In my left hand, I held the ruby and peridot, my preferred combination for dealing with the infernal Deeps-dwelling creatures that Esther had arrayed against us thus far this week. In my right hand I held the ritual knife. Several more stones sat at the ready in the exterior pockets of my jacket. I prayed they would be enough.
The doors rattled a third time, and as the solid wood cracked, Vittorio’s voice came onto the PA once more.
“Prepare for breach. Foyer, stand ready.”
In a single moment, the doors shattered, the guards started opening fire, and a cruel purple light began to seep into the foyer.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
The world failed to slow for me. So many things happened so quickly that I could not catch them all. The doors broke into pieces on the carpet, the guards filled the doorway with lead, and Carter yelled in full voice.
From there, the next thing I saw was one of the guards held aloft by a tentacle, screaming as blood gushed from his mouth.
I held the ruby and peridot aloft, reaching into the Deeps and unleashing a blast into the doorway, hoping to push back whatever it was cloaked by the purple light.
The unearthly scream told me my bolt had hit home, and the purple light receded a shade.
Carter stomped the carpet. “Come and get it, you tentacled pieces of crap!”
I tried to sort through the fog and the purple haze, searching for any familiar silhouettes.
Two Vexl leapt through the high doorway, breathing fire down at Carter.
“Draw!” I shouted in Enochian. The rubies pulled the flame up and away from Carter and into the gem.
Unsinged, Carter still faced the Vexl, and was now flanked at his sides, neutralizing the utility of the guards. But Carter fought wisely, stabbing at one creature, slashing at the other, then leaping back in a ten-foot bound, allowing the front two guards to open fire on the creatures.
Though now peppered with purple-oozing wounds, the Vexl did not stop. One leapt at Carter, the other at the guards. Presuming and gambling that Carter could handle himself, I channeled the ruby’s power through the peridot and shot the Vexl out of the air, slamming the beast against an interior wall. The creature whined in a cavernous voice, then twitched on the ground.
Wispy shapes charged through the front door, the three guardian spirits of Antoinette’s store joining the fray. But if they had been outside, why fall back to the foyer? Worry nagged at the back of my neck, but I kept focus, trying to take in the entire scene at once and react between heartbeats.
Two of the spirits dog-piled on the Vexl fighting Carter, while the other, Igbe, leapt upon the one I’d knocked into the wall. The wood and carpet were ruined by sizzling purple blood, but the Vexl was still within seconds.
Antoinette’s steady chanting provided a comforting base beat to the din, flows of power anchoring her three guardian spirits to this world. The local spirits were entirely in thrall to the Gardener, so there would have been no reason to try to turn them to her will.
While the spirits and Carter fought the remaining Vexl, a larger monstrosity crawled its way into the room. Twelve feet tall, the thing curled up into itself to fit into the room, then unfurled its many tentacles and opened its heptagonal beaked mouth to scream with three tongues in as many octaves.
A Xoggox. Inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft’s Shoggoths, the real things were iridescent purple, with scales so smooth and reflective that they took all ambient light and bent it to the color purple. I’d suspected as much, but I’d never seen a Xoggox in person. Mother and Father had sent us all away the one
time they had to summon one to fight off the FBI. I hadn’t seen it, but we’d all heard the screams.
I snapped back to the present, watching the Xoggox crush two of the guards in its tentacles, bringing one toward its blooming flower of a maw.
Channeling more power through the peridot, I shouted, “Mavek!”—“Be gone” in Enochian—and struck at the base of what I thought was the tentacle holding the maw-bound guard. The blast severed the tentacle, but did not stop the Xoggox. The creature grabbed hold with several more sucker-covered tentacles and carved into the doomed guard with its overlapping beak-mouths.
Wincing, I gathered more power to strike again. The two other guards fired into the trunk of the creature, which slowly slid forward to fill the foyer. They emptied entire clips into the beast, seemingly to no effect. Simple firearms would do nothing, in point of fact.
“Explosives only! Bullets are worth nothing against a Xoggox!” I said.
“That thing’s a Xoggox?” Antoinette said, her voice high.
“Yes. But they can be beaten,” I said, reaching for more power. I reached down through the ley line at the castle’s foundation, traced its roots through the earth for miles until I found a tributary of power, a node of mana, and drank energy into every cell, until I was filled to the brim.
I held the peridot close to my arm, anointed the working with more blood from my arm, pain from the fresh cut heightening vision and scent, the offal stench of the Xoggox pressing in, trying to fill my mouth and nasal cavity.
My mind and body alight with all of these disparate sensations, I began to chant the ritual of unsummoning, reaching out to wrestle with the working that bound the Xoggox to the surface world. Esther’s summonings were powerful, intricate, with strong foundations, her bindings like a thick braid of forces.
So, one by one, I picked at the strands, pouring power through the peridot. Carter, the spirits, and the remaining guards, supplemented by several more that emerged from the doors behind me, all laid into the Xoggox, the guards throwing grenades and flares, even producing glowing machetes and charging the beast to their rapid and inevitable deaths.
These men and women threw their lives away quickly, without hesitation. Whether their bravery was born of magic from the Gardener or simply a platinum-strong sense of duty, I did not know. But their bravery felled the other Vexl and bought me enough time to cut loose the Xoggox’s moorings and open a gate in the floor to cast the beast back into the Deeps. I closed the portal, shearing off a pair of tentacles that held fast to the floor, their suckers ripped off.
The purple glow faded from the room, and the floor reasserted itself, the gash in the world closing and solidifying. Gems and blade dropped from my twitching hands, and I fell forward onto the railing, which creaked under my weight.
“That. Was. Awesome!” Carter shouted.
Gasping, I neglected to respond.
“It’s not over,” Antoinette said. “We need to get that door replaced.”
Vittorio spoke over the PA again. “Foyer. Status report.”
One of the guards held a hand to his ear, pressing something on a helmet. “Two Vexl and a Xoggox down in the foyer. Door destroyed, three personnel down. No sign of Bogey Alpha.”
“The exterior guard is falling back to your position. I’ve called maintenance to come for the door.”
Five men and women in body armor but no weapons emerged from a side door with three-inch-thick steel sheets on a rolling cart.
They had barely gotten the sheets into position, moving to start riveting, when the whole room shook.
“Contact! Bogey Alpha at the left side of the front door! Positions!” Vittorio shouted.
The left interior wall shook, then cracked, then shattered in three quick blows, letting in the sparse moonlight once more.
Riding on the largest Vexl I’d ever seen—eight feet tall at the shoulder—was my sister. Her hair floated and waved like seaweed in an aquarium. Her eyes glowed purple, filled with Deepness. Her face, arms, and clothes were smeared with blood and gore, like a cannibal Pict.
Her voice was ecstatic, barely contained. “Hello, brother! Such a warm welcome your host has laid out for us. Should I have called ahead first?”
CHAPTER
FORTY
The guards didn’t wait for my response, emptying their clips into Esther and the Vexl. The bullets impacted the giant hound, but instead of leaving wounds, they seemed to just seep into the creature’s hide. Esther went flat, flickering around the blows, laughing, paperlike jaw unhinged as she laughed.
The weapons clicked empty, and the guards went for fresh magazines.
While they reloaded, I focused through the peridot and stared at Esther, trying to pick out the working that had rendered her immune to gunfire. Her physical form was bound to the liminal, non-Euclidean power of the Deeps, making her form like that of the Gatekeepers, not truly of this world. The binding was complemented by a warding against the bullets themselves. The binding made her form flat and flexible, and the wards pushed her away from the bullets. Remove either element, and the working might be made void.
The guards raised their weapons to fire again, and Esther clenched her fists. The weapons folded and spindled in on themselves, crushing hands and faces as they went. Half of the guards fell, screaming, while the others merely dropped the ruined weapons to the floor.
Emboldened by their hostess’s chanting, Antoinette’s spirit allies leapt into the fore, coming at Esther and the giant Vexl all at once, high, low, and middle. Esther sliced at Agwe, and the Vexl slashed at Igbe and bit at Okayo. Carter ran up to join the fight, standing beside and behind Igbe, responding to the Vexl’s strikes, breaking its timing, slashing at its face and claws with his sword.
While they fought, I held my free hand out, visualizing as I tried to untie the knots of power that Esther had used to lock in the ward against bullets.
The working was slippery, resisting my will, squirming and bending away from my power. Very smart. The workings themselves took on the properties they were tied to, making her sorcerous knot all the harder to unravel.
So perhaps instead of untying the working, I could add something to it to achieve the same effect.
I grabbed the amethyst from my pocket and palmed it in my left hand, joining the other two.
Still holding the complex working in my mind, I drew upon the Deeps and added a layer to the working, shifting the ward from one that repulsed bullets and projectiles to being one that attracted them. A twist here, a pull there, tying my own thread of sorcery around Esther’s . . .
“Very clever, brother. Mother would be proud. But your time is up.”
The Vexl chomped down on Agwe’s form, which vaporized into formless smoke, then faded. While the rest of the world froze, the Vexl slashed through Carter’s guard, carving into his arm and chest, then slashed with its other forepaw to vaporize Okayo. Carter stumbled back. I aborted my working and fired a burst of power at the Vexl to halt its rampage. Esther plucked the blast out of the air, sucking it in like a noodle slurped up from a bowl of ramen.
Was there literally nothing I could do to stop her? Every piece of our defenses had been thwarted, even after banishing a creature that had made men’s minds turn on themselves with terror.
Rather than attacking directly, I drew power and manifested a block of Deeps around the Vexl’s legs, then crystalized it, trapping the creature in the solidified earth of its home.
The creature roared, and Esther, back in her normal form, reached down and knocked on the Deeps-forged earth, her ear attentive. Then she reached straight into the construct, hand stretching like she was retrieving something at the very bottom of a full bag, and pulled. The Deeps construct lost its shape, and spilled out onto the floor, dissipating.
“That’s strike two, brother. Do you have any tricks left, or are you ready to give up now?”
&nb
sp; My mind raced for another option, a fresh approach that Esther wouldn’t be able to unravel so easily.
While I hesitated, Carter engaged the Vexl again, slicing and parrying with the talwar in his off hand. He was sweating, armor rent in several places. His movements were slow, pained. He wouldn’t last long. None of us would.
Antoinette tossed a hematite at Esther, which erupted into a writhing mass of cable-thick vines, entangling the Vexl’s legs.
“Run!” Antoinette shouted, moving for the door. Esther moved her hands, unraveling Antoinette’s working.
I followed Antoinette through the doors, along with the remaining guards—two carrying a wounded third, whose arm had been turned into a bloody pretzel within his ruined rifle.
The doors swung close behind us, and then steel gates slammed down, covering the carved wood.
“Fumigating foyer now,” Vittorio said on the PA.
“There are wounded guards in there!” I shouted to the walls, hoping he could hear me.
“I’m not letting that crazy bitch any farther into this house,” Vittorio said, his voice cold.
I heard another monstrous yowl from the front room, even through the gates.
The balcony rimmed the whole room, splitting and going back to two doors that led toward the servants’ wing and the waiting room. Another half-dozen guards lined this room, loaded for bear, their weapons leveled at the entrances.
Below us, the main double doors shook with the impact of a car collision. A moment later, they shook again.
We moved toward the back of the room, the guards taking the other side of the walkway. We got behind the guards. An older man with a shaved head and thick glasses ordered one of the guards to take the wounded man, leaving the other two to take positions. The wounded man was escorted down to the servants’ quarters.
It would be a wonder if there was time for medical attention.
Another metal-rending pound. The metal security gate had a huge dent, where the Vexl was making short work of the Gardener’s protections.
Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods Page 22