by Faith Hunter
She raised a sword toward me in the sitting lion and cut across my body. My block was ugly, but it stopped her blade. The jar vibrated up my arm into my spine. I slipped on the crusted ice, landing on one knee. The succubus bent over me, pressing the point of her blade against my neck, her eyes holding mine. A triumphant grin lit her face as she reached for my waist. I felt the heat of her fingers against my side. She was going after the amulets.
Her head wrenched back and she fell across me, drenching me with blood, Audric’s sword buried in her chest. A small shock speared me. It was like seeing myself die, a prophecy of my own demise. She landed across me, and I was showered with the sweet scent of mage blood, my blood, tainted with brimstone. A Dark mage glamoured to look like me? Or one created with my blood to look, feel, smell, and react like me? A Dark clone? Dark mist flowed out of her flesh as she slumped to the street.
“What was she supposed to do?” Eli asked. “Take Thorn’s place?”
“Not with those eyes,” Audric said, twisting his sword back and out of her flesh.
Across the street, I spotted Ciana and screamed. My throat tore on her name. She was stepping over ruts and across dead spawn, walking with a measured, steady gait. She passed a group tearing into a man’s body, eating. They didn’t look up. Drawing on the bloodstone hilt, I lunged toward her, stopped by a four-foot-long serpentlike thing with hundreds of jointed legs. It hissed and snapped. Before I could react, Eli hit it with flames. I cut its legs off in a two-foot-long swath, my sword dragging through the snow beneath it. The thing tumbled to one side, burning, the stench like rotten meat and butyric acid. I gagged, stumbling away, screaming for Ciana through the gathering smoke.
She was barely perceptible, sitting beside Zeddy. A conjured shield was wrapped over her and the downed man, rendering them nearly invisible. If I hadn’t known where to look, and if her pin hadn’t blazed like a campfire in mage-sight, I would never have seen them. How had she opened a shield? Humans couldn’t manipulate creation energies.
I wiped my mouth, which was bleeding from some injury I hadn’t noticed. I looked from my blood to the shop, which still glowed in mage-sight like a beacon. This was twice Ciana had gotten past my ward without burning herself to a crisp. How? Questions for later. I repositioned the knives, feeling clumsy and jittery. Uncoordinated.
“What’s wrong with you?” Eli demanded, stomping on a jerking leg and breaking it into small pieces. When I didn’t reply, he pulled me around and slapped my face. My head whipped back, the pain a keystone my mind could grasp. My cheek stinging, I met his eyes. His fingers dug into my shoulders and his mouth landed on mine, the kiss hard and searing and tasting of beer. He pulled back, his amber eyes blazing. “Snap out of it, girl.”
I nodded and took a breath, searching for my center, placing my feet with care as he released me and triggered the flamethrower, burning a cluster of spawn to crisps. Only minutes since the start of the attack, yet spawn were everywhere, scuttling up and down the street in a well-coordinated attack. Spawn couldn’t coordinate their own bodily functions, let alone a battle. I searched for a Darkness directing the fighting. The war-torn street was full of men throwing up barricades in front of homes and elders chanting prayers and hurling plastic bags of water. Thadd and Durbarge fought back-to-back in the night.
From the north, the direction of the Trine, forms darted into the street, human-shaped but demon-quick, carrying blades and guns. “Daywalkers,” Eli whispered. “I count nine.” Six moved toward Thadd and the succubus he still fought. Durbarge fell to the ground, barely moving. The remaining three walkers came for us, moving slowly, spreading out in a three-pronged attack pattern. “Hold this,” Eli said, thrusting a cross into my hand. “And hit ’em with these.” He gave me two bulbous plastic bags sloshing with fluid.
“Bags of water?” I asked.
“Wastewater. From the kirk.” He laughed, as if that weren’t bizarre. “Used baptismal water and purification water is cheaper and more plentiful than water from the Dead Sea. It slows them down, makes them easier to kill.” His tone said I should have known that. “Especially vampires,” he added.
“Daywalkers aren’t vampires,” I said, my lips swollen and numb. “Day. Walkers. It…” I licked my lips, losing track of my thoughts for a moment. “It sorta defeats that whole ‘beings of the night’ thing.” I must have sounded witty, because Eli laughed.
The three walkers surrounded us, moving like hungry lions, half-crouched. I shook my head and set the bags of water on the snow at my feet, assuming the walking horse stance, the cross held with the weapons in my left hand. My arms were heavy, my grip weak; I was afraid I’d drop them.
The two nearest Eli attacked; he drew knives from his belt and threw. “They’re sexless, half-demon things that drink blood,” Eli said, drawing breath between strikes. “I’ll give you the sunlight part, but try the cross. Holy icons work.”
Holy icons? A human was giving me advice about holy icons and fighting Darkness. A human. Tears rose at my uselessness and I looked down at the cross, two hunks of wood wrapped with lengths of metal. It had no power, no stones for me to draw on. And I had no soul and no faith to give it power. Watching the walkers tease Eli, I sheathed the two throwing knives and gripped the cross in my scarred fingers, movements clumsy. My hands felt strange, stiff and buzzing. The walker nearest me grinned, showing fangs like slender needles.
Beside me, Eli fired his flamethrower. The daywalker blazed into a fiery dervish even as he turned to the next. It crouched, grin wiped away, fangs flashing, shock on its human-looking face. Eli held up his cross and picked up my two bags of baptismal water; the beast reared back as Eli aimed and tossed. The bags burst on contact and the walker screamed, batting at its body. I was still standing, feet planted in the ice.
“Thorn! Move!” Eli shouted. The world smelled of eucalyptus and rosemary, roasted meat and rotten things. The third walker laughed and darted forward. I stared at my death. Time slowed, dragging at my mind.
My bare hand held the cross, fingers frozen around the base. Useless. The word was a gong of power in my head. The cross was a primitive thing, wood and metal. Shouldn’t an icon, a thing of power, look sculpted? Be beautiful? Useless. It was useless. I was useless.
My hand, and its scars, was a dull, blotchy white on the bare wood. Ugly. Ugly scars.
The walker was roaring, a long raucous note, its mouth ratcheting wide in slow clicks of motion. Beyond it, in a circle of light, a small band of teenagers attacked two spawn. A girl fell, bleeding. Aware I was moving with mage-speed as time dragged around me, I shifted to watch, turning from the walker. In an instant, two others fell, a boy and a girl, trying to pull the first to safety. The others circled around, hacking the spawn with kitchen knives.
Distantly, I was aware of blood, of someone nearby shouting my name. Useless, the word gonged again, and something quivered across my skin. Useless. I looked at my other hand and it quaked weakly. Useless, it whispered to me. Useless. Children were dying.
“Thorn?” Eli called, his voice far away. In my peripheral vision, the walker reached for me.
I stared at my hands. I’ve been spelled. My brain struggled with the concept. My hands were coated with some thing. I knew how to fix that. Didn’t I? Screaming, Eli crashed into the walker, striking with a blade and firing a handgun. The explosion was deafening. I smelled cordite and a wisp of hyssop, rosemary, and salt. Holy water.
Half a block away, four screaming women beat at a spawn that was munching on something small lying in the snow. Almost lazily, it reached up and grabbed a woman’s wrist, pulling her down to its open mouth. It bit down on her throat. Two other women raced up, carrying automatic weapons, firing into the spawn’s body.
Still holding the cross, I reached beneath my ruined tunic and gripped my prime amulet, the stone ring that incorporated my blood, that had been tied to my genetic structure by master mages at my birth. I drew on it, calling on both primes, the bloodstone hilt of the sword an
d the prime ring.
Heat from the amulets shot through my frozen hands and up my arms. Electricity zinged through me, arching my back, clearing a small lucid place in my mind. I dragged my gaze from the fighters. I could see the spell on my hands. It was conjured of thin bands, and dull orange energy traced around them like veins, forming gloves made of infirmity.
My brain was too drugged to form an incantation to free them; instead, I drew on the power stored in my amulets and simply directed it against the curse. Nothing fancy. Just raw power. Blue light sizzled across my flesh and deeper, into my bones. As my mind cleared, I noted the intricacy of the incantation that had formed it, a subtle and complex conjure.
Eli shook me, his singed, blood-splattered face inches from mine. “Wake up, woman,” he shouted. He’d been burned, and blood trickled down his face from a cut bisecting his left eyebrow. I raised my hand, the cross in my palm resting in his hair, and touched a fingertip to the wound. Blue energies made a soft hiss against his skin. His face hard, he pulled me close and kissed me again, his lips sizzling with the same energies. “Son of a seraph,” he whispered softly, the curse dangerous. But my mind was elsewhere.
I remembered the Book of Enoch and the gloves I had worn. Sennabel? No, not Sennabel. And not the gloves. It would have been too risky; they could have been misplaced, discarded, used by another. Yet, someone had known I would want that book.
The strange piece of paper inside. Ah. The note. A trap laid for me, one weakened or delayed by my wearing protective gloves. Maybe triggered by falling night. Had my touching the Book of Enoch this morning initiated this attack on the town?
Mind clearing for the first time in long minutes, I pushed away from Eli, handing him his cross, his emblem of faith, useless to the soulless, whom God never hears. Zeddy was down. Had gone down fighting to protect his family, including his half sister, Cissy, a child of nine. An innocent. I could have called mage in dire. The criteria had been met long ago. And if the seraph who answered also decided to punish guilty humans? That was the catch-22 of mage in dire. But I didn’t have a choice, hadn’t had one since the spawn attacked. Feeling the last of the nebulous spell dissipate, I stepped over dead bodies of daywalkers, gripped the visa, and called. “Mage in battle, mage in dire, seraphs, come with holy fire!”
Eli stepped back and looked up.
Overhead, something screamed.
Chapter 17
“Too late, little mage.” The words echoed across the buildings. “Too late to change the course of this night.”
Eli swore, or perhaps prayed. He lifted his flamethrower and hefted a plastic bag of baptismal water.
I followed his aim up, into the black sky. Above the town hovered a leathern, seared shape, crackling with dark energies, wings outspread, clawed hands reaching wide. Its naked body was muscular and strong, but disfigured, flesh puckered and scarred, wings featherless, the skin between the bones thin and ridged with scar tissue. It was a huge being, power rippling across ruined flesh like black lightning. Yet its face was wholly, flawlessly exquisite, as if carved from a slab of perfect white marble. The face of a seraph, created by the Most High to be entrancing, captivating. Not a Fallen Watcher. Something much worse.
I almost cursed, but swallowed down the words before it could hear and think it was summoned. It was a Major Power, and I knew—I knew—it was Forcas. One of the true Fallen. A seraph who had gone his—its—own way. It looked at me, meeting my eyes.
Eli wound up like a pitcher and threw the water. The bag hit Forcas on the arch of its foot, rupturing and splattering. The water sizzled and smoked into vapor. Forcas laughed. Eli fired his flamethrower. A gout of fire rose into the air. Forcas inhaled, drawing the blaze up its body to its face and into its lungs, still laughing. Eli stepped back, rigid with shock.
It swept its wings open. The cloud-smeared sky and distant moon shone through the scorched skin stretching between the wing bones. With a tremendous rush of frozen air, the wings closed and opened. Eli raised a gun, firing a barrage of shots, the bullets filled with holy water. With a negligent wing, Forcas knocked him aside and landed. An amulet hung on a thong around its neck. The spur. Sweat trickled down my spine, prickling like broken feathers.
I raised my sword, a puny weapon in the face of such might. It pointed one long, slender finger at me, holding my eyes. Its irises, in that white, perfect face, were violet, like the velvet of flower petals, but brutal, cold, pitiless. Its voice boomed, “I have you again, body, blood, and spirit.”
My damaged side spasmed. The pain spiraled out, smoldering, entwining my torso, piercing through the invisible wound where a talon had speared me twice. But there had been no physical wounds. Psychic injuries only. A taloned hand reached for me.
My legs gave way and I fell, twisting my knee and thigh muscle where the spawn had clawed it. A dead walker broke my fall and I gasped, whispering mage in dire again.
Ciana looked at me from across the street, her eyes looking older through the shield, wiser, and full of grief. Her mouth formed my name. I rolled from the walker to the blood-soaked snow. My side contracted again in unbearable agony. Forcas laughed. “Mine,” it said.
The pain exploded. Violent violet pain, the color of Forcas’ irises, a ruthless anguish, ripped through me. Lying on the snow, my head lolled down, my face in the frozen mass. Dying. I was dying.
From somewhere, some distant place, lavender eyes watched me, eyes so similar to Forcas’, yet darker in hue and full of mercy. Eyes… I had seen these eyes before, in the face of a cobra, in my dreams, and, once, on the Trine. The eyes of Holy Amethyst’s wheels. Eyes. Wheels within wheels, covered with eyes. Like the Mistress herself. Eyes. The eyes of El Roi, the god that sees me. I knew it, but I didn’t understand, didn’t know where the knowledge of the name came from.
I heard the wheels softly singing, like bells and wind instruments, and the bellowed breath of a distant galaxy. “We cannot come. We cannot. We are not yet healed. Are caught in time. Sooo sooorry…”
Taloned hands wrapped around my waist and lifted me. The agony, which couldn’t grow more, penetrated deeper, a torture so great my breath froze solid in my lungs. Forcas pulled me close to his face, his strong white teeth bared in a grin.
A fireball landed on the snow with a spit of sound. Eli’s flamethrower? Shooting at us? Two other blazes, brilliant white, round balls of lightning moving in unison, touched down on Forcas’ hands. The Darkness roared and wrenched away. My body flipped in the air, my hair a spiral around me. I landed again on the snow, face to the sky, and air whooshed out of me in a pained grunt. Fire was dancing all around me, coiling, curling balls of energy, gusting blue smoke, seven globes the size of conch shells, moving and whirling in concert.
One landed on my face and I flinched, but there was no pain. Closing my eyes against the brightness, I managed a breath, cold air blistering my lungs, the movement of air fluttering the flame. It landed on my scarred hand, settling like a bird at its nest. I opened my eyes and watched as six others chased Forcas into the sky. Ridiculous sight. Tiny, spherical flames chasing the oversized Darkness.
Forcas cursed the Most High, a curse so foul it shivered the air. The spheres divided into groups of three to Forcas’ left and right, arranged themselves into arrow formations, and attacked. Darting beneath its wings, they pierced Forcas’ sides. I blinked my eyes against the flare of colliding energies, brilliant plasma streaking the night. Minions of the Light.
Relief swept through me, so intense I sobbed. The Flame on my hand wavered with the sound and darted up to perch on my mouth. Suddenly I could breathe, could think. The fireball, a searing orb of light, seemed to wink at me, and danced away, taking my pain with it, leaving something else in its place, some other emotion. One so improper for a battle that it took a moment for me to identify it as it bubbled up in me. A blossoming euphoria. The blaze jetted away, joining its brothers as they harried Forcas, who hovered in the air above me, wings beating.
I was sure th
ey were Flames. More correctly, Minor Flames. Though I had never seen them, I had heard of the self-sustaining, intelligent creatures. Spirit and energy, they were thought to be composed of plasma and were members of the High Host, part of the Seraphic Council. They were warriors, holy beings not capable of transmogrification, beings who always looked like fire. Historically, they followed seraphs at the call of battle dire.
High above the town, Forcas pulled its sword, demon-iron sweeping up, a shivering cold like black light dancing off the blade. The Flames whipped in and out, slicing and burning where they touched, then darting away before the Power could react. Forcas bellowed and I covered my ears at the sound, a low-pitched roar of fury and pain. Harried by Flames, Forcas ducked and wove, swatting with its blade. Its blood, blacker than the night sky, splattered to the snow with spits of steam.
At Forcas’ head, light appeared, blinding, wrenching, taking away the night. In its midst was a seraph. He had heard my call. I sobbed, sucking in air, lying on the snow in the blood of daywalkers at the feet of a Major Darkness, staring at the battle in the heavens.
The teal-feathered seraph in scintillating battle armor threw power from one bare hand. Bolts of white light stabbed at Forcas. Only inches from its body, they spread into crackling pools that skimmed away, moving in smooth arcs, bouncing off its shield. From Forcas’ sword, blackish-purple light burst outward. The seraph vanished and reemerged, as if flashing out of and into reality. The black-light power slid past him. The seraph drew his shield, a glistening disc that bent light like abalone shell. Their wings beat the air.
I rose up on my elbows as energies shivered above me. The hair on my arms and head lifted, electrified. The seraph, dusky-skinned, with curling, smoke-colored hair and a widow’s peak, drew his sword in a steel-on-steel swish, a harsh sound like pulsing blood and slicing pain and death. The blue steel, silvered and gilded with light, raised up, trapping Forcas between the Minor Flames, the earth, and escape.