Think. What can we do that might actually work?
The pounding undermined my thought process quite effectively, as the Vexl carved a yard-long rent in the metal.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, my voice breaking.
“You were doing something to one of her enchantments, right?” Antoinette said. “It seemed like that was working.”
“She’s countered every move I make, seemingly without any more effort than you would take swatting a fly. She’s amassed too much power—I can’t fight her just drawing from my own strength.”
As if to drive home my point, the security gate crumbled beneath the Vexl. Guards fired into the gap, and a moment later, the rent widened, and the Vexl climbed through, quickly followed by Esther.
While she was momentarily separated from the Vexl, I shouted, “Pain!” and poured power through the peridot, targeting the beast. The creature flinched as if hit on the face, then roared, charging forward into the waiting guards, taking shotgun, automatic rifle, and grenade fire as it went. Wounds appeared on the creature, and a bud of hope bloomed in my heart once more. I hit the Vexl with another pain working, which slowed it while half of the guards reloaded. The commander fired grenade after grenade from a gigantic cousin to a revolver, and the monster gave ground.
Esther leapt back onto the Deeps hound, and at her touch, it straightened, seeming to grow larger, more confident.
Her touch gave it the edge, the protection. All I had to do was separate them long enough to finish the Vexl, and then I could focus on subverting Esther’s working.
But that would take time, time to be purchased at a high cost in human life.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
First, I shouted another pain incantation, focusing on the creature’s left legs at the joint. The creature shook, the legs curling up into its body by reflex. Then I shouted, “Push!” and focused the agate on Esther, sending a force working at her. But not from the front. I arced the wave of force from the side, pushing Esther off her perch. She landed on her side, rolling off.
“Kill it!” I shouted, lungs burning as I reached out to push Esther farther away from the Vexl. The room filled with the report of gunfire while I strained to match Esther’s will. She crawled back toward the Vexl, which writhed, wailing at the highest register of human hearing.
I called out once more, my Enochian invocation turning to a guttural yell as I strained to keep Esther from the Vexl. The guards’ guns tore the creature to pieces, and with a final, tiny cry, it collapsed.
Emboldened, the guards turned their guns on Esther. She went flat once more, waving in the bullet-punctuated air. Her arms lifted high, and she wailed in Enochian, “Crush!”
The weapons folded in on themselves, collapsing like metallic pretzels, breaking several more bones of guards not fast enough to respond or so dedicated to keeping up fire that their sense of self-preservation lagged far behind common sense.
“Enough!” Esther said, the weapons all gone silent.
Carter, his sword untouched by Esther’s working, launched forward with an extraordinary lunge.
Esther fluttered to the side like seaweed. Carter cut back at her, and the two of them danced for several moments, her movements barely evading his relentless assault. After the third strike, Carter dove forward to tackle my sister.
But again, she wavered out of the way, folding nearly flat. Carter tumbled over where she had been and tucked into a roll. Esther wafted back upright, bringing a flat hand up, her palm glowing dark with the Deeps.
Seeing my moment, I shouted another burst of power. Esther held her other hand out to catch my blast, but splitting her focus delayed her blast long enough that Carter dodged out of the way.
Three guards with machetes joined the melee, and once more, Esther became the bending bamboo in a storm.
And while they kept up the pressure, I resumed my earlier attempt. I drew the power, focused on Esther’s working, and started to thread in my own addition to ruin her seemingly-unbeatable protections.
Esther took off one guard’s head with a burst of power, then maneuvered to dodge a strike from a machete and let it carry through into another guard’s shoulder.
“More pressure!” Carter shouted, but I was committed, could not be distracted. These would be the last casualties if only I could . . .
Esther wafted into the air and settled on the upper railing. She faced me and said, “Very clever, brother. But once again, you come up short.” She ran her hands over my working as it tried to burrow into her protection, and pulled it off like a stray hair from an alley cat. Then she whipped the enchantment at one of the guards, just as the commanding officer lined up a shot, red dot showing on Esther’s forehead.
“Don’t!” I shouted, but it was too late. The gun’s report covered up my plea, and I could have sworn I saw the bullet bend in the air, wavering from its path to punch straight through one of the machete-wielding guards’ heads.
Esther grabbed the machete out of the guard’s hands and turned to Carter, pushing forward to get inside the range of his longer blade.
If I could not hinder Esther’s protections, then I would add to those of my allies. I drew power again, and went short of breath, as if stricken. Too much, too quickly, and far too much this week. Much more, and I’d be coughing up blood. I wheezed in a breath, and focused on Carter’s blade. Pouring power through the peridot, I aligned his blade exactly opposite to the signature of Esther’s protection, hoping to achieve the same effect without targeting my sister directly.
I lost my breath again, dropping to my knees. I pulled myself up over the rail to fix my eyes on Carter as he danced, evading Esther while cutting off her advances, moving with incredible grace considering his many injuries and having been running just as hard as anyone these last few days.
The other guards were barely of any help. They’d move in, and Esther would carve into their strikes, turning a blow against one of them into a parry against one of Carter’s strikes. Again, I realized how incomplete my training had been. All part of the design, the prophecy.
My lungs empty, eyes watering, I completed the working on Carter’s blade, then collapsed onto my side, lungs spasming.
The sounds of battle continued as I fought to pull air into my lungs, clawing for purchase, desperate for air to drink into my lungs so I could rise again, keep fighting, and do something, anything to end this fight.
Someone grabbed me and pulled me up to a seated position. Then a strap wrapped around my face, and a fresh blast of air inflated my lungs. Wakefulness surged through me like lightning. I shot up, bumping whoever was holding me. I turned and saw Antoinette holding some sort of respirator, which she’d affixed to my face.
Looking over the railing, I saw Esther in paper form, whirling and lofting around Carter’s cuts.
But upon closer examination, I saw two wounds on my sister that had not been there before—on her arm and across her ribs. Had the working succeeded, or had Esther retreated to the flattened form when the tide of the melee turned against her?
I started to reach out for more power, then cut myself off. I did not know how much the respirator would help.
Instead, I turned to Antoinette, lifted the respirator, and said, “The Gardener.”
She nodded, and I hoped that I’d conveyed all I needed to, without having to say, Only the Gardener has sufficient power to defeat my sister at this juncture. We must fall back and force his hand.
Offering me her assistance, Antoinette and I retreated once more, descending the stairs that led to the waiting area, which had two more guards posted at the doors back to the Gardener’s sanctum.
“Let us through,” Antoinette said.
“No one is allowed in,” said one of the guards, a thickly-built woman with a Mexican accent.
“Fuck that,” Antoinette said. “Your boss ne
eds to get into this fight, unless you feel like getting ripped apart like a co-ed in a slasher flick, which is what’s been happening to all of your colleagues.”
Not the simile I followed, but to each their own.
“Get your lily-white ass out here, now! Your people are getting slaughtered!” Antoinette yelled.
The guards’ eyes went wide, and they stepped aside as the doors flung open, revealing the Gardener, his suit mussed, sleeves rolled up. Dots of sweat speckled his brow, and his hair was slicked with effort. He’d never been anything but entirely composed, which had the effect of making his current appearance seem entirely slovenly.
“I am doing everything I can, child. I was not meant for this sort of conflict. But if my chosen are insufficient for the task, then I will take matters into my own hands.”
Behind him, Nate looked on, a welt rising on his face, his hair disheveled. What had happened behind those doors? He had a bandage on his arm, and there was a crucible on the table, a ritual knife beside it. Perhaps the Gardener and my family were not so different, each spilling blood for their own purposes, cultivating the success of their desires.
My stomach turned at the thought. But like it or not, the Gardener was likely our last line of defense against Esther and her apocalyptic ambitions.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
The room shook as something slammed into the door. I turned, pulling Antoinette with me as I raised my hand. The door cracked under a powerful blow.
“Stand aside!” the Gardener said, passing into my line of sight.
“To Nate,” I said, gesturing with my head. Antoinette helped pull me back into the ritual room, where the actor gripped tight to the handgun, her breaths coming rapid, uneven.
“I will not let her get to you,” I said, instantly regretting having made such a promise. But to take it back would do even more damage than to leave it be, even if it meant making a liar and oath breaker of myself. But if I had to die to uphold it, the oath would mean little.
The door cracked again, and I sat on the table, taking up the ritual knife, pulling my sleeve up, and, with gritted teeth, cutting a long line from my elbow to my wrist.
“Blood of my blood, daughter of my mother, closest kin and greatest foe,” I said in Enochian, beginning an incantation to bind my power to Esther’s. If I succeeded, I could channel her power, shunt it off, and perhaps even the scales of power, allowing the Gardener to triumph.
Gardeners were not the warriors of the celestial schism. They stood apart, still bitter over the exile of humanity from the First Garden. Their influence was vast, their power gathered over millennia, but direct confrontation was as close to their nature as being a social butterfly was to mine.
I tasted blood on my lips, biting tight to control the pain from my self-inflicted wound, the blood dripping into the Gardener’s ancient crucible.
The door shattered, revealing Esther in her flattened, hair-waving form.
The Gardener raised a hand, and spoke in a low voice, the words passing straight into my ear and out, my mind unable to grasp them.
A shadow passed over Esther, her form fluctuating between the flattened state and her real body.
“Fire!” the Guardian said. The two guards complied. I reached out, pulling at the immense reservoir of power bound to my sister. The power pushed me away like a magnet, my working not quite sufficient. Or perhaps it was me who was not enough. I stood, took a deep breath, and pushed forward, pressing through the resistance.
Energy flew and colors whorled in the room as the Gardener and Esther matched their powers. The Gardener’s magic was verdant green and white, matched against Esther’s purple and black.
The Gardener’s guards and Carter closed in on Esther, and for a moment, they had the upper hand, the Gardener’s power flowing into my roommate, guiding his sword, mending his wounds with shimmering light.
Carter’s sword found purchase, piercing Esther’s arm as she brushed aside a thrust. But with the spilled blood, Esther formed a ragged blade and slit the throats of the remaining guards, drawing their blood out to form a cat-o’-nine-tails. She turned the whip on Carter, wrapping around his blade and disarming him.
I’d reached an impasse myself, partially in but unable to touch Esther’s power, like when your arm was just barely too big to reach down the grate to retrieve the toy teetering on the edge of the chute that would carry it away to oblivion.
But I could tell that Esther was struggling against my effort, so I persisted, letting my arm continue to bleed, feeding the cauldron and the working. I would not continue for long without passing out.
Antoinette held me upright, chanting something in French, adding her voice to the blessings protecting Carter.
Esther’s bloody cat-o’-nine-tails tore at Carter as he charged forward, tackling her to the ground. Esther dropped the blood working, reaching for her knife. Carter caught her hand, and the two rolled on the ground.
“We have to get Nate out of here!” I shouted, hoping the Gardener would listen to me.
“The time for running has passed, Greene,” the Gardener said, his voice once again resonant, inhuman.
I felt a momentary lapse in Esther’s concentration and plunged my hand deeper, touching the dark, sticky well of power. I grasped the energy and pulled, drawing it in.
As the power flowed into me, I felt nauseated, like my soul had been plunged into weeks-old offal, despoiled countless times by Vexl and Xoggox. I shunted the power into my peridot, causing it to glow with light-swallowing blackness. I pulled power, drank deeper and deeper, depleting the seemingly-endless well of energy that Esther had accrued.
I collapsed into another coughing fit, my body screaming out its limits. Antoinette braced me, but my concentration was shattered, and Esther ejected my presence, the backlash burning my hand like I’d stuck it into ice.
For several long moments, all I could do was reel, focusing on breathing.
When I came back up, Carter lay with a knife in his gut, the Gardener sat slumped against the wall, his head cracked open, and Esther held Nate up by one hand, grabbing the necklace that contained the Heart of Manhattan with the other. “Stop . . . her,” I said, my voice barely a whispering croak. I grabbed carpet and pulled myself after Esther, achingly slow as she strode away, Nate tossed over her shoulder like a sack of feed.
Antoinette ran after Esther, swiping at her with a machete picked up somewhere along the way. Esther dodged the cut and backhanded Antoinette across the face, knocking her to the floor.
As Esther passed the wounded Gardener, she kicked him in the ribs, then spat on his face. Over her shoulder, Esther said, “Farewell, brother. You know where to find me, if you decide to join the winning team.”
And then she was gone.
I crawled several feet after her, my vision growing dark, lungs straining to draw in the tiniest gasps of air. As Esther reached the front door, my body finally gave out, and the world went black.
I shot awake all at once. “Where is she?!” I shouted, my voice rough as sandpaper.
Strong hands pushed me down, and I focused on my breath, lungs cooperating once more. Carter sat above me, his armor discarded, his undershirt torn and bloodied. Antoinette sat beside him, sporting a growing bruise on one cheek.
“Where?!” I said, trying to push myself up.
“She’s gone, Jake. It’s done,” Antoinette said.
“We have to get to the park,” I said. “There’s still a chance to stop her.”
“What do you think we’re doing?” Carter asked, gesturing up.
We were in a car. No, a limousine. I’d never been inside one, but normal cars didn’t have long crushed-velvet seats facing one another.
“Ah, yes,” I said. “Are you hurt?”
“Banged up, but we got off easy. The Gardener got up and started barking orders with his
head cracked open, and ninety percent of his staff is dead,” Carter said.
“Along with Igbe. The other two were just banished, but Igbe is gone. I can’t feel his presence, and he doesn’t answer, not even when Agwe calls.”
“The bag?” I asked, reaching for the shoulder-slung satchel that had been my lifeline this week.
“It’s here. Just relax, see if you can rest some more. We had to do CPR to get you breathing again.”
“That would explain the sharp pain across my chest most comprehensively, yes.”
Carter fed me water in sips, and as the driver slowed, lifted me up to a seated position.
“We’re here,” the driver said, a bandage across one eye.
The park was sparsely populated for a weekend midday.
Wait. What day was it? I laughed at myself for losing track of time, then instantly regretted it as the sharp intake spiked the pain in my chest. Rapidly sinking grades in my classes were, fortunately, quite a ways down on my list of priorities.
I kept my breathing shallow and accepted the help from Antoinette as we made our way to one of the entrances, passing by a moss-encrusted cobblestone wall bedecked with art from various street vendors, hawking their wares and trying to make ends meet. As we stepped into the park, I felt waves of power crashing against the threshold of the park.
“Faster. The ritual of the third circle has begun. I can feel it.”
Getting closer to the intermittent crowds, I saw that the faces of the people in the park were all drawn tight. They looked over their shoulders and moved in packs, as if expecting a predator to leap from the brush at any moment.
And then, one did. A smaller Vexl burst from the underbrush off a path and dove at a trio of joggers.
“PAIN!” I screamed in Enochian, my fingers clutching the peridot, the hatred and frustration of countless failures fueling my working. The Vexl crashed to the concrete path, bowling over the joggers. Carter leapt forward and chopped the Vexl’s head off with a single stroke.
The joggers screamed, then scattered.
Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods Page 23