That’s it. If I got out of this weekend alive, I was going to start training Rocky-style in the event I ever needed to fight again. Egg yolks and “Eye of the Tiger” it was.
To add insult to increasingly-likely injury, the fucker was now amused. He circled me on one side, and as I scrambled away, he moved faster than seemed fair and came up my other side, twirling the machete in a show-offy kind of way. He faked me out a couple more times, toying with me, his malicious yellow eyes alert for any hint of what I’d do next.
My only hope was to run. This being was faster than me, stronger than me, and a more experienced fighter than me--not to mention his big honkin’ blade, and my noticeable lack thereof. If I could get where people were, or back to my friends, just maybe he’d hesitate at being outnumbered. But in the time it’d take me to get up, the fae could take my head off.
Well, there was one thing he might not be expecting.
I yelled, a wordless battle cry, pushed myself into a crouch, and threw myself forward, tackling his legs.
He toppled as I hugged his knees for all I was worth, and I caught terrifying flashes of light off the blade as his arms flailed for balance. I damn near pissed myself imagining the machete coming down and slicing off an arm, but at least my head was temporarily shielded. The fae had a strange, strong nature-scent that reminded me of the smell a firefly leaves on your fingers after you’ve caught it, and his skin didn’t feel quite like skin.
As he hit the ground with me partway on top of him, my forearms bruised and scraped on the rough earth and there was a twinge of pain where my wrist twisted. My teeth slammed together with the impact. I didn’t stop to think about it; I just yanked my arms free, ignoring the abrasion of the ground on my skin, and scrambled to my feet. I took a step toward running, and a hand wrapped around my ankle.
I tried to kick my way free, hopping on my other foot to try to keep my balance. The wild kin pulled himself into a sitting position using my leg as leverage, and I stumbled and lurched, going hard to one knee. The mask-like face grinned horribly at me. One hand shot out to my throat. The other raised the machete.
And a stream of filthy, swampy water hit him square in the face. He fell back, dropping his blade, clutching his face and screaming as his skin steamed.
“Run!” Vivi grabbed me under one arm and hauled. She had her water pistol in her other hand--I’d forgotten all about my own. Her grip was harder than I would have expected. I caught the quickest glimpse of her face as I got to my feet, and I swear it was both Vivi and not-Vivi. Whatever I’d seen earlier was there, but with her, not instead of her.
It took me half a moment to orient myself when I got up, and I headed blind toward the lights at the center of camp. I raced as hard as I could, my lungs flaming, struggling for every breath, and only after I’d sprinted a distance did I risk a look backwards. My attacker was now fighting another fae. Thank gods. Vivi kept pace beside me.
I kept running, because if that new opponent wasn’t up to the challenge of a whirling machete, I was still going to need all the head start I could get. It was a long, long way back through camp, and I was nowhere near in shape enough to keep up the mad dash. My sprint slowed to a lope, and then a limping sort of jog, and then as I got close to the center of camp I resorted to a determined stagger, one hand pressed to my ribs where a stitch throbbed sharply as I gasped for breath.
Definitely time for “Eye of the Tiger”.
We kept going to the edge of the trees, finding our way to the dark path and making our way down it. Before long, I was guided by the martial red glow coming from the wards, and soon I heard the familiar voices of my friends. I blinked back tears of relief.
Vivi put a hand on my shoulder, nudging me against the trees. I remembered the wild kin who had been left with our friends, and nodded. We crept forward, craning our necks to see what was going on.
It was a standoff. Cherry, Joe, and Sara clustered around Tamar and Dionne with their hands resting on the two women’s backs. Tamar and Dionne chanted and made slow, deliberate gestures with their hands, and it looked like they were repairing or shoring up the frayed spots in the ward’s net of energy. The wild kin hovered nearby, watching them without helping or hindering. But on the other side of that red glow, Murmur stood with arms crossed and a baleful glare as his bogeys threw themselves against the barrier, clawing at it, chewing it. The fierce energy dissolved them, and they made horrible noises as they disintegrated. Murmur gestured, and another wave rushed in. Dear gods, there were so many.
We drew back a few steps. “What do we do?” whispered Vivi. The strangeness had left her face, and she looked frailer without it.
“Dunno,” I murmured back. If we both walked back in, the other fae would know something was wrong. And I needed Vivi to stay out of the fight. “Stay here. Be ready for...anything. I don’t know. Just stay out of sight or they’ll be suspicious.”
She nodded. I took a deep shaky breath, relieved to feel my constricted lungs loosening up again, and strode into the clearing.
“It’s done,” I announced. “I sent them through the circle and closed it. I know you all don’t like it, but it’s one less thing we have to worry about tonight.”
My friends stiffened but ignored me and kept on with what they were doing. The wild fae exchanged glances. “Closed?” one asked. “Completely?”
“Signed, sealed, delivered,” I said. “Sorry, buddy. Your fearless leader said that as long as my crew could hold the wards, he figured you’d manage okay on your own.”
Cherry fell back, covering her ears. “Shut up!” It startled me, but it was directed at Murmur. “Just shut up! That’s not true. It’s not true!” That was when I saw that Joe’s eyes were squeezed shut as tears rolled down his face. Shit. I couldn’t see the others’ faces.
The wild fae huddled together, muttering amongst themselves and glancing at the wards, my friends, and me. It was clear they were uncertain what to do. They reminded me of those hyena packs of boys full of bravado and mockery who suddenly aren’t so tough when the head bully gets suspended.
“What did he promise you?” I worked the hunch. “He said that if you allied with him, he’d take you with him back into Faerie, didn’t he? He said he’d get you home and now you’re shut out again.” They all went quiet; I suspected I was right. “Why were you exiled?”
“It is not like that.” The one who spoke sounded defensive. “We can get stuck here, you know. The doorways are much harder to find anymore.”
“Speak for yourself,” growled another, but offered up no more explanation.
“I don’t really care what you did or didn’t do.” That was true for the moment. “Right now, I just want to know that you’re going to stay out of our way. You can run off and hide in the woods if you want to. You might stay safe when the wards fall. Or you could always back us up.”
Dionne covered her eyes with one hand and howled in anguish. Tamar put an arm around her. “Resist! Shut him out. I’ve got you. I know you can do this. Come on, work with me.”
The one who seemed most alpha at this point gave me a skeptical look. “What is the deal you offer?”
“No deal,” I said, taking them all aback. “You either do or you don’t, up to you. I know you’re not going to fight us, because if we go down, so do the wards. So you can stay out of the way, and hope we know what we’re doing enough to handle it on our own, or you can throw in with us and help things go in all our favor when it gets bad. You’re stuck here tonight as much as we are. You don’t dare go outside the wards. There’s no door left for you to get out of this realm. The demons’ll come hunting you too if they get in. Seems to me we’re the enemy of your enemy right now so maybe you’d like to pitch in for our mutual survival.”
For a moment they sat in silence, giving each other significant looks. “We will help,” said Alpha.
“No attacking any of the people
in this camp,” I pressed them. “Or exploiting them, manipulating them, tricking them, or anything like that. No turning on us either. If you do, you become fair game.”
Alpha shrugged. “The worse things get, the more likely we will try to save only our own skins.”
“Still leaves us better off than if we were all at each other’s throats.”
Alpha made a noise that might have been a chuckle.
Everything that happens now is your fault, and yours alone. I warned you. It echoed loud in my head.
Get out. Get out.
Their blood is on your hands.
I closed my eyes and summoned up an image of my Beloved, a memory of the heaven within his arms. I pictured Rosa, tall and ferocious, standing between us and Murmur in the woods and daring him to cross her. I remembered being in Murmur’s dead realm, the radiant vitality pouring out of my body to destroy his evil constructs.
For once, I didn’t feel scared or small.
I banish you from my mind. Know that I will make you pay for every tear my friends shed because of you, for every moment of pain you caused them. I will destroy you if I can.
I heard the rage and snarling, but whatever he said next was cut off, as I slammed a door too long left ajar.
All of us, human and fae alike, held the line together there in the woods and contemplated the red glow of the challenged wards as they faded at last into a colorless heat shimmer. Like a candle flame lowering and dying, it gave us a last full look at the rows upon rows of demonic constructs on the other side, and the hateful void-face of their leader, until the last of the glow flickered away and left us there in the dark with only a thin shield of will between us and nightmare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We stood our ground.
It seemed like there should have been something else we could do, but I could see my friends tiring. I wondered how Boden and his allies had fared and whether I should have tried to bring back help. There was still music and ordinary crowd noise coming from the direction of camp, so I figured either he’d won, or the wild fae had gotten to the fairy circle and decided to ditch this battleground.
I wanted to check on Vivi, who was still hiding nearby, but I couldn’t risk it. It made me jumpy and anxious to wait in this moment before the inevitable, with nothing more I could do. I made my way over to Dionne. “Can I help with the wards?”
The shadowy outline of her shoulders shifted, a slow shrug. “Feed energy to Tamar and me if you want. But we can’t keep this up much longer.”
I couldn’t see the horrible things that waited for us in the dark anymore, but I could picture them, the rows and rows of them. “They’ll overrun us when they come through. There are so many of them.”
“I know.” Neither of us had to elaborate. We both knew how hopeless this was, how pitiful.
More silence. I paced and shook out the tension from my hands. Inside my head the stillness was so loud. Outside, I heard moaning, creaking, a sound like a gigantic bug zapper going off over and over. And the shrieking of the sacrificial bogeys as they died.
“Get ready.” Dionne’s voice was tight with fear and tension. “The wards are coming down.”
I planted my feet on legs as unsteady as a newborn fawn’s. This was it. The repairs couldn’t keep up with Murmur’s army tearing through them. I’d upset his plans, run his allies off, and shut him out without any idea what his next move would be. It was a safe bet that it’d be along the lines of a scorched earth policy, perhaps literally, just sheer destruction with our pitiful few under-prepared defenders on the front lines to be mowed down first.
I’d like to say that I had some sense of destiny, a tiny light of hope that we would find a way out of this. But in truth, I was thinking that I wished I’d had more time to put my sorry-ass life back together before it was so casually snuffed out. I stood clutching my plastic water pistol, staring into the darkness, and shaking so hard with fear and adrenaline that my teeth clattered.
The wards glowed a much fainter red as the bogeys surged against them, just enough to see a hellish sight that I expected to haunt my sleep for years if I got the chance to sleep again. The walls of the barrier stretched like a membrane, pulled taut over spindly fingers and claws and gaping mouths and lumpy eyeless heads. The zapping noises still buzzed in concert with Murmur’s flies, blending with the bogey’s screams of pain, but it was eclipsed by the tearing sound as they began to break through. It was a horrible sound, a fleshy sound, a cracking like bone. The monsters were snarling and hissing, baying and wailing.
Dionne lifted her large yellow water pistol and fired a neat stream at one of the rips. It dissolved the edges of the rip, but splashed liquid red energy onto the bogeys behind it. They fell back, howling, and others swarmed in, forcing limbs through the enlarged hole. We all followed her example, lining up shoulder to shoulder and shooting war water at them. The wild fae drew crude weapons and hovered nearby.
It was so little, this effort, against so many. My ears throbbed with a vast rumbling and the ground shook, and I knew that all the wards had fallen. Murmur’s army flooded toward us, shrieking and hissing.
I saw so many of them coming toward us, intent on us, that at first I didn’t realize what was happening. I raised up my free arm in front of my face, held up my pistol with trembling grip, and stood my ground. And then I realized how many of them passed me.
Only a small number circled us, just enough to put us in serious danger. The rest, including Murmur himself, flooded past us without sparing a glance and headed toward camp.
That was his retaliation--forcing us to fight off this small horde so we couldn’t pursue the rest of them, forcing us to know that every moment we spent fighting was a moment we also spent thinking about what they might be doing to the innocent people in camp, and being unable to help.
That was all the time I could spare to think. There was something horrible with a wide dripping maw coming at me, slashing at me with grasping clawlike fingers. I ducked and dodged and kicked out at it, and what my foot impacted with was semi-solid, a gelatinous body in a rubbery membrane. Not fully material, but enough to put some hurt on me. I stumbled back a step and thrust the water pistol at it, pulling on the trigger. It reacted to the spray like it was acid, shrieking and writhing.
One of the wild fae appeared behind it and took the bogey’s head off with a swing of a large knife. It gurgled and keened as it collapsed, and then the remnants evaporated. I nodded to the fae, a slender being with a feminine mouth and two sets of huge, unblinking eyes surrounded by feathers. “Thanks.”
She nodded back and whirled around to fight another of the monsters. Two more were closing in on me. Everything around me was a blur of movement and I couldn’t tell what was happening or who was winning. I fired my pistol at the things coming at me, and realized the streams were getting smaller. I was running low on water. If I couldn’t get out of here and run back to Free Radicals to refill, I would be all but defenseless.
One of them slammed a huge pale fist against the side of my head. It was like being hit with a bag of water, the force enough to take me off my feet. I landed hard on my side, scraping my arm, and I scrabbled back in the dirt, searching for anything else I could weaponize.
It dropped into a crouch and lumbered over me, looming, a pallid bloated thing somewhere between a corpse and a maggot, its round sucking mouth pulsing as its sloshing weight began to pin me down. I thrashed and kicked, trying to wriggle free, trying to push it away. Even in its weird semi-solid state, I could feel its weight pressing down and knew that it could smother me.
The entire fight seemed hopeless. I didn’t know what I was doing and my friends were guessing too. The wild fae might be effective, but how long could they hold out? Would it be long enough for all of us to get out of this tiny clearing, to reload our pistols or look for other weapons? Thoughts of zombie movies filled my head, monsters th
at were deadly in their sheer numbers.
The thought of these bogeys swarming over me and ripping me into bite-sized chunks gave me an extra edge of panic, and I flailed with fresh desperation and punched at the torso of the thing that had me pinned. Survival instinct gave me a shot of force, and I drove my fist into what felt like a vat of jello.
I punched through the rubbery membrane of its skin and into its innards, and it was so repulsive that my whole body spasmed, trying to shake it off. But my arm was buried to the elbow, and my jerking gave me the chance to get a good feel around in the gooey viscera. I struggled to pull free, and my hand closed on something more solid. The bogey thrashed and roared and reared up, and my arm slid free with a wet sucking sound.
The thing enclosed in my fingers looked like a piece of marble, smooth-faced and bigger than my palm, and there seemed to be a fragment of a letter engraved in it. I looked back up at the bogey and saw an instant of realization in its hideous face. And then it blew apart, a burst blister, the bits swirling in the night air and dissolving into smaller bits before vanishing.
At first I wasn’t sure how it was connected to the stone in my hand, although I was sure it was. And then I remembered standing at the edge of the pond--was it only yesterday, when we’d gone swimming?--and envisioning human bodies as collections of iron filings clinging to the magnet of the spirit, the soul, that gave them life.
I stared at the stone in my hand. Dionne had said that in order for “noncorps” to take physical form in this world, they needed some kind of energy to draw on, something to give them shape. Something to sustain that form until they could reach a tranced-out host and force their way inside. But they wouldn’t be held together by a living soul, a spark of life. I turned the stone over in my hand. It looked like a piece of cemetery stone, from a headstone or a mausoleum. Murmur was a death demon. Had he placed something full of death energy, instead of life force, inside them to create these temporary horrible bodies?
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 36