Pi lost track of the fight, but she knew that she and Clara were now just as much a target as the angel behind them was. Still she fought on. It wasn’t only her wyrd that was infused with the holy energy that allowed her to kill the angels, but also her weapon. She found that out when some angels got too close for her to react with wyrd, and she had to strike out with her sword. Great fissures were opened wherever she struck, and the holy power infused in her blade snuck in, burning the fallen from within with holy fire.
As Pi saw a turn in the tide, she began to have hope. The fallen attack was thinning; more sorcerers were gathering closer to where they stood, ambling toward the pulse of light from wherever they’d been fighting before.
Just as Pi thought they might win, a concussion vibrated through the air, and sorrow rippled out from the Votary House.
“Atorva!” the angel said, turning to the Votary House. That moment was enough of a distraction for the fallen angels to act. White feathers filled the air, and blood cascaded to the ground. The angel screamed out in pain, and Pi looked behind her to see one bloody white wing fall to the ground.
Their protecting angel slumped to the ground, one wing treading air, the other nothing more than a bloody stump writhing back and forth, trying to work a wing that was no longer attached to his body.
Behind him the red-headed angel stood, her sword slick with blood.
“I asked where you were going. It’s rude to ignore people.”
“Deven?” Clara said, looking back toward the house, but there was no sign of her brother.
Devenstar’s head was ringing. He came to in the bushes, a blast of wyrd having carried him there. But for some reason the angel hadn’t killed him. He wasn’t sure why she hadn’t, and he could think of a million reasons why she should have. A pulse of darklight would have done it, sent him beyond the Black Gate and out of her hair. But before a blast of force from her had smashed him against the wall and into oblivion, she had seen the pulse of white light from the angel on the corner, and she’d turned that way.
Slowly he picked himself out of the bushes, untangling dead leaves and twigs from his hair. His back hurt, and he was pretty certain his shoulder was dislocated. Given what could have happened, he shouldn’t be complaining, but damn did it hurt!
He slumped against the wall, anchoring his arm on a window ledge, and heaved himself down on his shoulder. Blind pain shot through his body as the joint slipped back into place. Devenstar crumpled to the ground, half in the low shrubs and half out. He bit back a curse even as he groaned in pain. But at least he could use his arm again.
When he sat back up he realized the fallen angels were nearly gone, and those that were left were already engaged by other wyrders. Deven only had mind for one fallen, and she had vanished somewhere into the gloomy morning light.
He stumbled down the knoll and toward the white-winged angel. Logic said that was where he would find the red-headed angel.
Then a wave of sorrow swept over him from the house behind him. The air vibrated with it. Devenstar was nearly taken to his knees, but he stumbled on, even as the angel he traveled to turned and screamed a name at the house.
As if in slow motion Devenstar saw the red-headed angel step up from behind the white-winged angel and slice through its wing, right at the base where it met his body. The angel fell to his knees, a scream of pain on his lips.
Deven wasn’t going to make it in time, not to save his sister and Pi. The fallen lifted her sword, stepped around the angel, and brought her blade down. Before she could finish her strike, Deven blasted her with golden lightning. It wasn’t enough to harm her, not since the holy energy that had empowered his wyrd before was fading, but it was enough to distract her.
The white-winged angel stood, rounded on the fallen, and let out a pulse of white light into the dismal morning. The red-head fell to her knees, crumbling to ash as she drifted to the concrete. One point of starlight drifted up and away from the scene.
Content that it was over, Deven slumped to the ground, fell to his back, and gazed up into the smoky sky.
Dalah wasn’t sure what happened. At one moment the High Votary was praying, and the next, his slack hand was slipping from her grip. She was still coming to grips with her surroundings when something struck Flora, flipping the older lady over the edge of the building and out of Dalah’s reach.
A laugh behind her made Dalah turn. She saw the weathervane sticking out of Atorva, pinning the High Votary to the rooftop, his blood pooling under her slippers. She was still numb with what happened to Grace, and wasn’t really feeling anything, only seeing it. Knowing the High Votary was dead registered with her, but didn’t sink in right away.
“And now we are alone,” a deep voice said.
Dalah’s eyes drifted away from the sight of Atorva and to the fallen angel who’d killed him. The angel was as thin as a wisp, with little to no muscle that Dalah could see. His lank brown hair hung in tangles around his angular face. The only thing robust about him were the majestic black wings that fluttered overhead.
He smiled at her and started to say something, but Dalah’s eyes fell to the broken basilica that buried her lifelong friend beneath its rubble. She thought of Grace, the bossy, bitchy hag she had come to love like a sister. The woman who said all the things Dalah thought but was too polite to voice. The way Grace fiercely defended those she loved, even if she was defending them to another person she loved.
As if by thinking her name, the image of Grace came to her: broken, bleeding, and dead beneath the pile of stone.
And then something snapped inside of Dalah. She felt the ebbing holy energy of Atorva washing away from her body, back to the building. But she pulled on it before it could go any further. In anger she lashed out, the pure holy energy mixing with her own wyrd. Thousands of barbs of ice shot from her skin, embedding themselves into the angel before her, lancing holy energy through his body. He gasped, rocked back, and made to leap into the air.
But the attack had weakened him, slowed him down. With a strength fueled by wyrd, Dalah yanked the weathervane from the Atorva’s body and jammed it through the angel’s chest, carrying her weight through the strike to pin him to the rooftop.
“How do you like it, you unholy son of a bitch?” she seethed.
He gasped for air, gasped for life. His hand quivered as he reached up to her, pleadingly. His mouth moved through the pain, like he was trying to say something, but Dalah only twisted the weathervane.
“You were nothing more than a wretch in your human life. Becoming Arael’s lapdog didn’t change a thing, it only gave you wings. And I will take them away, you bastard.” With a force of wyrd she lit his wings aflame, slowing the hunger of the fire to a slow smolder, melting the feathers and pooling the skin of his wings beneath his body like wax from a candle.
She watched the angel gasp for breath, unable to die, but mortally wounded. She crossed her arms and stood there. He reached out to her with pleading fingers, begging her to end his life, but Dalah refused.
“You will die here alone,” she said. “With no one here to love you, no one to mourn your passing.”
She walked around him. “That’s what dalua like you deserve. No love, no remorse, only unadulterated slaughter.” And then with one final pulse of wyrd, the flesh was stripped from his bones, carried up into the air with the force of Dalah’s mind. Moments later his body crumbled to dust at her feet. As the ashes of his passing twisted into the air on the morning breeze, one point of light started spiraling up to the heavens.
“No,” Dalah said to it. “You don’t get to be reborn from this. You aren’t forgiven.” She reached out, took the cold light into her hands, and with a lick of wyrd, extinguished his light forever.
“So that’s it?” Pi asked, resting her hands on her knees. “We made it?”
“Some of us,” the angel said, he limped up the knoll toward the basilica and sat down heavily on the stairs.
“What’s that noise?” a sorceress
near Pi said.
Pi cocked her head to listen. A moaning, gurgling noise could be heard, coming from beyond the veil of smoke created by burning buildings and fire. A strange, listing shuffle arose out of the morning light, and shapes, just out of sight, lumbered closer to their group.
Something inside of her body screamed in horror at what came, even if she didn’t fully understand yet what she was looking at. Her wyrd reacted, or maybe some deep-seated survival instinct. She grabbed Clara and pulled her toward the Votary House.
“Run!” she demanded, cresting the knoll and darting for the building. Screams rose up behind her, some ending in a liquidity that made Pi blanch.
“What the Otherworld?” Devenstar cursed, sitting up in the lawn as Pi and Clara thundered by. “Dear Goddess.” Deven stood and pounded past them, hammering on the door of the High Votary House, but it was locked from within.
“Hurry!” Pi said, not wanting to look behind her, but when Clara retched into the winter-withered bushes, she couldn’t help but turn.
Corpses. Hundreds of dead bodies were crowding the streets of Lytoria. Bugs, clouds and swarms of pestilence blanketed the sky, blocking out whatever meager light had accrued since dawn. That same survival instinct screamed in Pi’s blood. She knew she didn’t want those bugs anywhere near her.
She threw an orb of wyrd around them as a stream of thumb-sized bugs rained down on them. She wove a strand of fire into the warding. When the bugs hit her orb they sparked, sizzled, and fell dead to the ground.
“The bedroom!” Clara said. “Hurry!” She pulled on Deven’s shirt and yanked Pi toward the side of the building, retracing their earlier steps to Devenstar’s bedroom window.
“Kill them with fire!” they heard the one-winged angel yell from his post before the basilica.
“Right,” Pi whispered.
Even as they ran the deceased were gaining on them, sloughing up the hill, oozing like some dead plague toward them. A corpse stumbled into their path. With a squeal Pi doused it with a bout of green flame, igniting it. The dead body tumbled back down the snowy hill, leaving charred bits of carrion in its wake.
“Don’t let them touch you,” Deven said, gazing down at the hunks of rotted meat left behind. As they passed by the remains, Pi looked down and saw milky worms slithering out of the glob of flesh, slowly creeping toward her and her companions. Gorge rose in her throat, but there was no time; another corpse was lumbering up behind Clara, its arms outstretched.
She didn’t make it in time. Pi lifted her hands, blasted out with fire, but the creature had already sunk teeth into Clara’s neck. Clara screamed out with pain, her body shaking, wracked with fiery pain.
The gout of green fire ignited the corpse seconds too late. It fell back into a bush, and the dry shrub ignited in green flame. Pi pulled Clara close, inspecting the bite mark. But the damage had already been done. A swath of milky worms were already tunneling into her flesh.
“Leave me!” Clara said, reading the look on Pi’s face.
“No!” Pi said.
“Yes! Leave me!” Clara yanked away from Pi and dashed down the hill, into a swarm of locusts. An orb of fire ignited around Clara, charring bugs and dead bodies alike. Pi screamed out her pain and tried to dash after Clara, but Deven lifted her off her feet, hoisting her through a window. She struggled to climb back out, but he blasted her back with a force of wyrd, crawling in after her.
He shuttered the window tight, sealing it with wyrd.
Outside they could hear dead hands pounding on doors and windows.
“What do we do?” Devenstar asked himself, knowing that Pi wasn’t in the right frame of mind. He suppressed the urge to give in to the fear that his sister was dead. But she was a sorceress. Only removing her head would stop her, right? He wasn’t even sure that was true any longer. How many injuries could one sustain before they died, headless or not?
“Deven?” the familiar voice of Flora came from outside the room. “Thank the Goddess you made it back inside.”
She looked beat up, harried. “I just barely got back inside myself,” she told him. She entered the room and pulled Pi into her embrace. “I saw what happened with Clara as I was breaking in. I’m sorry.”
Deven shook his head, holding up his hand. He didn’t want to hear it right now. Right now he had to focus or he’d become a shivering mass of tears like Pi was, in the grips of their teacher.
“We need to get higher. We need to fight them from where they can’t reach us. They’re dead. From what I see they can’t hurt us unless they can reach us.”
“There are the bugs,” Flora said. As if her words had reminded him, Devenstar could hear them outside, their clacking wings and incessant chattering.
“Pi created an orb around us with fire wyrd that seemed to work.” He looked down at Pi, who had dissolved into a noiseless lump on the floor.
“What are we going to do with her?” Flora said. “She isn’t well enough to come with us; we’ll be too concerned for her safety.”
Devenstar nodded. “I’m sorry, Pi,” he whispered. He laid a hand on her leg and infused her body with his wyrd, freezing her in place. At least she can’t get herself hurt.
A great explosion came from the sky, followed by a bright flash. A large flaming mass of rock hurtled out of the heavens toward the west. The light illuminated the plight of those struggling with the armies of death in Lytoria. Another explosion came, and another burning mass. Minutes dragged by like hours as one explosion after another shook the earth and burning rock lit the sky. Fire, falling like rain, began cascading to the earth.
Figures dashed here and there, trying to save themselves from the rain of fire. Most were successful. Some weren’t as lucky, being crushed beneath stones or ignited in flame as the burning rock burrowed into their bodies.
With the coming of light, Lytoria began to hum again, but this time when the song crested to meet the fiery sky, it wasn’t with a joyful noise, but with the voice of Chaos.
When it ended, only moments after it started, Lytoria was in flames. Few buildings remained standing, and even fewer people remained to fight. But still the armies of death came.
Jovian was sitting vigil at Maeven’s side when, a day after the attack, he changed back from an eagle and into a man. Jovian was worried at first what it could mean, but when he didn’t notice any signs of the rephaim attack, his racing heart calmed. For two more hours he sat by his boyfriend’s side, willing him to wake up, and finally he did, with a giant stretch and a moan.
Jovian had been drifting in the beginning of a dream, but when he felt Maeven’s hand tighten in his, he jolted awake. With his free hand he rubbed his eyes, and cursed the headache that was beginning to throb behind his eyes from lack of sleep.
“Well, hello there,” Maeven said, and smiled sleepily at Jovian.
“Hey,” Jovian said, smiling back.
“You look like something’s wrong,” Maeven said, and chuckled.
“Nothing at all. You were only bitten and nearly killed by a rephaim, other than that everything’s fine,” Jovian said.
“That’s it?” Maeven said. But then he turned serious. “What happened?”
Jovian told him about what they’d learned in the Vault of Fates, about the attack, about Cianna being stolen away, and about the giant coming to help them.
“And they think the groo will help us? Take us to the Turquoise Tower?” Maeven sounded skeptical.
“That’s what they say. Apparently we’ll get there very fast,” Jovian said, not really believing it.
“Oh yeah, very fast,” Maeven said. “They were one of the three defenses created by Aaridnay, they are wyrded to be fast.”
Jovian thought for a moment about how fast he’d seen Joya move when she was wyrded, and shivered, trying to imagine riding on the back of an animal going that fast.
“When do we head out?” Maeven asked. He sat up in bed, stretching his arms high overhead, and rubbed a hand through his short dark hair.
>
“We were just waiting for you to wake up and see if you were okay,” Jovian said.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” Maeven wondered, looking at Jovian incredulously.
“You were bitten by a rephaim, Maeven, we aren’t sure what side-effects that will have,” Jovian told him honestly.
“Like, some kind of transference of power?” Maeven wondered, leaning back on his arms. When he’d shifted his clothes had fallen loose; when he turned back into a human he had fit back into them, but they were now tangled around his body, looking off-center and uncomfortable.
“Something like that,” Jovian said.
“Well, I can tell you I’m hungry right now, and it’s not for blood or death. Do we have any food?”
Jovian smiled. “Yeah, it’s almost dinner time. The giants have been taking care of our needs like that.”
“Awesome, let me wash up and we’ll head out.” Maeven looked around the room. “Um, where’s the wash basin? Are there tubs?”
“Even better,” Jovian said. He let Maeven gather his clothing and then led him down the hall and to the right to the common bathroom. Inside was a chamber, separated from the rest of the room by glass walls and even a glass door. He showed Maeven how to work the levers and switches while the other man undressed.
“And it rains on you?” Maeven asked, his face scrunching up in confusion.
“Yeah, it’s rather great,” Jovian said, stepping out of the bathing chamber and letting Maeven step in.
As Maeven lathered himself up he looked around at all the odd sights of the inside of Vorustum-Apaleer. He had many questions about why the walls looked so different than what they were used to, or why the lights were stationary, and what kind of wyrd or substance fueled them. Jovian had no answers for him other than a shrug.
The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) Page 19