Out of the corner of my eye, Darius silenced the two screeching vampires, one right after the other—by removing their heads, which he then spat out. I watched one roll by me, mouth still open in a petrified scream, until it too dissolved to dust. You could only kill a vampire in a few different ways: stake to the heart or a good beheading were the preferred choices. Sunlight and fire worked too, and while there was no sun in the hive, only a manic rainbow of magic bursts paired with floodlights pouring down from all the different levels leading up to the top, we certainly had fire.
Jumping up, I covered my head and ran for Darius when the broken remains of a gargoyle plummeted down onto the courtyard. He reached out for me, that huge head steering me toward him. A few of the spiny bits sticking off his face poked my back, but I’d already started to mentally block out the pain where I could.
Head turned back, he assessed me through one eye as I shielded myself between his massive shoulder and the base of his scaly neck from the absolute magical mess imploding around us. When he snorted at me, smoke shooting out his nostrils, and gave an eye twitch, I nodded.
“Fine,” I told him. “I’m okay. Demon just got the jump on me. No serious harm done.”
He snorted again, this time a little softer, and then nudged me—and nudged, and nudged, and nudged, until it became clear he was trying to herd me toward something.
“Stop,” I ordered sharply, pushing him away. If I knew Darius, he was about two seconds away from picking me up by the scruff of my robe, which flapped open freely now, and carrying me. One look in the direction he was trying to send me and I knew what he wanted: there was a tunnel big enough for his dragon form to fit behind the castle. On my tour earlier, Eilie had told me it led to some undeveloped caverns—ones that eventually brought you back to upper Alfheim. I shook my head when he huffed at me, this time his mouth illuminating with blue flame behind his teeth.
“No,” I told him. “Absolutely not. We’re not running. We have to find Zayne. We have to…” I licked my lips, at a loss for words. “I don’t know. Protect people!”
While everyone here was technically part of the militia, I’d seen plenty of supernatural folk today who were clearly here for their building prowess or their brain—magical ability and brain just hadn’t factored in to their presence. I wasn’t about to leave them to die, not when I could defend them from the goons Abramelin sent to squash the resistance. Not a chance in hell.
My hands fell to my hips when I caught Darius rolling his freakin’ dragon eyes at me. Behind, his tail flicked hard to the side suddenly, pinning a goblin between it and the wall. The creature groaned as green blood gurgled out its mouth, and it lay motionless when Darius dropped it.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I stated. “I don’t know where Zayne is, but we’re staying and helping him fight.”
Another eye-roll.
“And you can cut the attitude, Mister.” I poked his neck as hard as I could. “Right now, you’re one of the best weapons here, so suck it up and go fry some bad guys.”
Huh. Who would have thought I’d be ordering a dragon back in to the madness? If I had a lick of sense, I’d take the out Darius offered and hightail it out of there. Maybe, somehow, I could get back to the surface level and rally some more fighting forces.
Although, according to Eilie, many “neutral” supernaturals weren’t too keen on throwing their hat into this fight and challenge Abramelin. Maybe if they saw the carnage in the hive, they might change their tune. People always shy away from a fight when they think it doesn’t affect them. Little do they know, Abramelin’s poison will seep into their souls too—all they had to do was wait and let him continue unchecked.
No. We weren’t going to run. We were going to fight.
After barreling through a squadron of goblins, me using my fae speed to knock them off balance—once from the right, once from the left, using the smoke billowing around the lower level to hide my attack—and Darius charring them to bits, we headed for the next rung of the outer floors. It was chaos everywhere, not just around the castle. Bursts of magic, beautiful for a moment, continued to rock the sanctuary, knocking stone from the walls and shattering the balconies overlooking the structure. The outer levels were nothing more than one long, winding ramp that worked its way around the edge of the hive. Waist-high walls would keep you from tumbling over the side, but I’d already heard a handful of shrieks as supernaturals tumbled over the edge from the upper levels, plummeting toward broken bones.
Or death on impact. I tried to reach out and catch one—a young fae who couldn’t have been more than eighteen—but she was just out of reach. The look on her face, the fear and shock of weightlessness as she fell, would forever haunt me. I watched her go, arms hanging out into the aerial combat zone, fingers outstretched and grasping for her. She didn’t have wings. Like me, she couldn’t fly. All she could do was fall.
She disappeared into the smoke growing across the ground level. One moment she was there, the next gone, engulfed in darkness. The clamor down the way from us brought me back to the fight, with Darius behind me, a grim determination in his eye that encouraged me to keep going. This was what I’d signed up for, after all. Death. Destruction. War. He gave me an out and I chose to stay.
I had to learn to stomach it all—and fast. Clearing my throat, I took a deep breath and hurried on, heading straight for the source of the shouting. Darius plodded along after me, cramped. The walkway was only just big enough for him to fit through, and the ceiling overhead of the pathway on the next level kept scraping his head.
At least I couldn’t hear him complain in dragon form. Bolstering my courage, I threw myself into the fray.
“Get back inside!” I shouted at a pair of dwarves trying to stab at the vampires on the other side of a door. Six vamps appeared to be trying to pry the door open, the dwarves trying to keep it shut. From the smell, I guessed that door led to the kitchens. No real fighters in there.
I pressed up against the wall as Darius shot forth a stream of blue flame. A few of the vampires managed to dodge it, running up the walls and flattening themselves on the ceiling while their companions writhed in agony before turning to dust. Before I could finish the vamps off, the two dwarves struck out with surprising speed, impaling both bloodsuckers with their kitchen knives before retreating inside. Two more piles of dust for me to walk through.
Not that I wanted to. It would be easy to demonize all the creatures fighting for Abramelin in the heat of the moment: goblins, trolls, gargoyles, vampires, and real demons alike. But as I pressed onward, Darius squishing along behind me, I realized these stereotypically “evil” creatures weren’t the only ones fighting. I watched elves clash with nymphs, the night elves on our side and the typically rather sweet nymphs fighting for Abramelin, war paint smeared along their high cheekbones like the latest matte blush.
It wasn’t until I reached the fourth level, having done what I could along the way to help all those in trouble, that I realized there were a few fae among Abramelin’s crowd.
“What are you doing?” I cried. Behind me, Darius had clambered over the little balcony and leapt across the hive. In my peripheral, I caught him batting down a swarm of gargoyles before slamming into the walkways on the other side of the hive. The fae in question whirled around, blood on his teeth and a dead shifter at his feet.
I could only assume it was a shifter: the woman was naked with her throat slit. She must have changed back to her human form after she died.
“You’re a strange one,” the fairy remarked, his head cocked to one side as his ice-blue gaze swept up and down my figure. “A little underdressed for the party, but I think we’ll make do.”
“How can you side with him?” I demanded, and he laughed at the quiver in my voice. I swallowed down the emotion, not wanting him to see the weakness. “He’s insane. You’re killing good, innocent people.”
“Shifter lovers?” The blond snorted and wiped his blooded hands on his beige dress shirt
, opting to display the blood rather than hide it in his black dress pants. “They aren’t good people. They’re betraying their own kind.”
My nose wrinkled. Hands curling to fists, it became quickly apparent that I wasn’t going to get this guy on my side. “That’s disgusting.”
“You smell disgusting,” he fired back without missing a beat. “Your scent… What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”
So, other fairies could sense that I was only half-fae. The others must have just had the decency to hide it from me all my life.
Perfect.
“You’re the only one who is sick,” I spat, cheeks flaming. “You’re destroying your kin and clan—”
He pointed to the dead shifter at his feet. “This bitch wasn’t my kin.”
“We are all part of this world,” I reasoned. “We should be protecting each other from this maniac, not—”
“Like hell I’m ever going to fight alongside filthy beasts.” He sneered at me.
Before I could get another word in, he charged me, his fae speed making him nothing but a blur. As I dove out of the way, scrambling to stay on my feet, I realized he was a shadowmelder—a fairy who could lose themselves entirely in the shadows. Lucky for me, with all the magic explosions and obscenely bright floodlights everywhere, there were very few shadows for him to meld into. As I ducked down and landed a punch straight to his gut, Darius’s roar rattled the hive. In my brief moment of distraction, my gaze searching him out, fearing he’d been hurt somehow, the blond fairy’s fist slammed into my jaw. Pain radiated across my face, behind my eyes, and I staggered back, swallowing a cry.
“Too slow,” he leered. “Whatever you are. You might look like one of my kind, but you most certainly aren’t.”
“No…” I used every ounce of fae speed I had when he ran at me, crouching low one half-second and shooting up into him the next. The blow threw him off balance, and just like the gargoyles at the train station, I took advantage of his momentum and shoved hard. He toppled over the edge of the walkway with a shout. As I straightened up and wiped a trickle of blood away from my split lower lip, I glared where he had last been standing. “I’m not one of your kind.”
Laughter crept across my skin after I turned away, and I spun back, eyes wide, to find him hovering there on the other side of the railing, baby blue wings flapping. Fairy wings… Of course. I’d always been so jealous of them. To me, they were the most beautiful things in the world.
He didn’t deserve them.
“Try harder next time, half-breed,” he snarled. I only just managed to dodge the orb of white magic he threw at me, though I felt the heat of it singe my hair. It slammed into the wall behind me, cracking in and shattering a window. When I tried to retaliate, he was gone. Panting, I inched hesitantly toward the edge, but he was nowhere to be seen. Darius, meanwhile, moved quickly across the hive’s cavernous center and squashed another gargoyle along the way, pinning the creature between his huge dragon form and my walkway’s railing.
It snapped the creature in half, but I blitzed its head with white magic, just to be sure.
“You okay?” I called, poking my head out to get a better look at him. Dark blood, almost purple, oozed out from under one of his scales, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. He gave me a snort in response, then fried an oncoming trio of gargoyles. I exhaled softly, pleased. “Good.”
After the fairy’s attack, Darius seemed less inclined to leave my side—not that I minded, or anything. We moved up the pathways as a singular unit, helping all those we could along the way. There were many within the militia who were more than capable of holding up their end of a fight. At one point, somewhere on the fifth level, we passed a dryad who had summoned tree roots through the stone and used them to strangle their opponents. He offered a toothy grin and a wave as Darius and I passed. I’d stared at the twitching goblins ensnared in the roots, wide-eyed and thankful that the guy was on our side.
I couldn’t be sure how long it took us to get to the top level. We faced a lot of heat on the way up: Darius wasn’t exactly a subtle creature moving through the battlefield. His size made him the target of anything with wings, which he seemed more than happy to either fry or chomp out of the air. While I had a few bumps and bruises, my lower lip bloody and my temple bleeding, I was in relatively okay condition when we reached the top level—given this was my first ever epic battle and all.
Time slowed during our march to the top. They say a thirty-second fight feels like an hour, and today I learned ten times over that that was absolutely the case. Every skirmish I entered dragged on, when in reality it was a minute or two, at most. My opponent either gave up, faced Darius, or was rendered unconscious. My dragon was more inclined to kill. I just wanted them knocked out.
We had no game plan in mind, but after breaching the top floor, I realized that, whether we thought about it or not, we had come here with a purpose. Still no Zayne in sight, but I spied Abramelin’s army puppet masters at a distance. Four warlocks in great black cloaks stood watching the whole thing, peering down at the vortex of magical chaos below—all four wearing identical smirks, as though this horrific battle was entertainment to them. Any supernatural who tried to flee through the main doors that led out to the other chambers were eviscerated by one of the four before they could get within ten feet of them.
“I think we just found our Big Boss,” I muttered, resting against Darius’s side, the pair of us as out of sight as we could be, given he was the size of a city bus. My dragon breathed heavier now, and every bone in my body screamed for rest.
But we couldn’t give up now. Not when we’d finally found the assholes pulling the strings.
“Cross over and try to attack them from the other side,” I instructed, wincing when one of the warlocks stunned a charging elf and then flung him over the side of the walkway. Down he fell, unable to flail, to scream—anything. How the hell was I going to do this? Gulping, I squared my shoulders and nodded toward the quartet. “While you’ve got their attention, I’ll try to blitz by and take them out one at a time.”
Darius huffed, the sound rumbling from deep within—he wasn’t happy about it. I couldn’t blame him, but what other choice did we have?
“I’ll be fine,” I insisted, though I didn’t believe the words, not even as I said them. “Just try to keep them busy.” Then, when he didn’t immediately spring to action, I fist-pumped his enormous front foot and grinned. “We got this.”
He rolled his eyes, and, thankfully, did as he was told. I watched from what little shadows there were as he moved from one side of the hive to the other. Given we were on the top level, the space between the two sides was larger, and my stomach twisted when he missed the top walkway and crashed down to the second. He managed to catch himself, but it wasn’t until he started climbing up, tail swishing at the creatures trying to stab him from the second walkway, that I breathed a little easier.
Although his jump wasn’t as elegant as I’m sure either of us would have liked, he succeeded in distracting the warlocks. All four studied him with pursed lips, expressions pinched in annoyance. Apparently, a massive dragon just wasn’t an intimidating foe to these guys.
Arrogant dicks.
Inhaling and exhaling two deep breaths, I summoned my final reserves of fae speed and burst forth, racing down the walkway with the aim of catching the warlock closest to me off-guard.
That plan failed, spectacularly, when he turned and flicked his hand at me. Seconds later some invisible force, with the strength of a wrecking ball, slammed into me. I cried out as pain shot through my back and up my spine. Thankfully, I had a fucking stone wall to cushion my fall. I hit hard, the impact making my world spin for a few uncomfortable moments as I slid down to the floor.
Only I didn’t have the luxury to recover. I now had the attention of two warlocks, who turned away from the chaos in the hive to focus entirely on me.
“You should have given in to the gargoyles when you had the chance, half-breed,” one of
the warlocks snapped, light reflecting off his greasy mop of long black hair. Had he gelled it down? Gotta look good before you can slaughter, apparently.
I bristled at the term, like my heritage was the greatest insult he could pay me, but refused to let it show.
“Fuck you,” I spat.
The pair exchanged amused looks, chuckling.
“Look at the mouth on her. So typical of shifter bitches.” The second warlock, his hair a flaming red and nose lined with fat freckles—each a different color, like body art. “I’m afraid, half-breed, that the gargoyles would have offered a less painful death than the one we have in mind.”
A burst of Darius’s flame caught all three of us off-guard, but the warlock nearest to him was more on the ball than I’d hoped. Before the fire reached any of them, he whirled around and threw up a shielding spell. The fire blasted against an invisible wall, which split the stream in half and rendered the warlocks totally unharmed. Even as Darius moved closer, the flame darkening to a brilliant navy blue, we could barely feel the heat of it on this side.
Not good.
Jumping on the distraction, I fired off two pulses of white magic at each warlock—which they deflected deftly with lazy flicks of their wrists. I tried everything in my arsenal: weather charms, Illumination strobes, energy pulses, transformation spells. The warlocks just seemed entertained with my efforts, deflecting and blocking whatever I threw their way until I had nothing left. The tank was empty, my energy depleted.
And then they had their fun. I had no words for the hex they used on me—all I knew was that it induced a pain so profound, so staggering, that I barely held onto my consciousness the second it hit me. I screamed, twisting and writhing on the ground, as they took turns blasting me with what felt like a magnified cattle prod. Each bolt sent agony surging through my body, straight down to the marrow. I had no thoughts, no fears, no plans to retaliate. All I had was pain unlike any I had ever known.
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