by Anton Strout
“Incoming!” I heard Marshall’s voice cry out before spotting him among the jumpers. He hesitated, but Aurora pushed him out over the edge, catching him by surprise.
Aurora followed after him, but the alchemist did not jump.
Caleb drank a vial of an elixir before climbing like a spider down the side of the freighter, losing his grip on it about ten feet above me.
“Damn,” he said, crashing down next to me at the front of the boat. “Thought that one would last longer.”
Before he had a chance to lament it any further, one of the cultists grabbed his leg as he attempted to climb out of the water. Caleb spun and kicked at him, driving the man back.
“We need to leave,” he said.
“No,” Aurora said from the water. She pulled herself up on the vessel after throwing her pole arm onto it. She rolled forward, grabbed the weapon, and came up standing and swinging for more of the men, driving them back from her. “First we need to clear the deck.”
Marshall came on board with much less grace than Aurora had.
“I’ll work on the leaving part,” he said, heading for the steering wheel at the back of the vessel.
With Alexandra concentrating on crumpling the freighter and Aurora and Caleb by my side, it should not take long to get under way.
Or so I thought. What had Alexandra called them back on the freighter’s deck? Rats fleeing a ship?
Yes, that seemed appropriate. Our ship was teeming with these Servants of Ruthenia.
“This isn’t working,” Marshall called out from the back of the ship, and I turned. The lean human was locked in combat with several of Kejetan’s men, all of them wrestling for control of the wheel. Lashing out behind me as I continued the fight in front of me, I used my wings to brush two of Marshall’s attackers away. The two fell over the edge of the small boat into the water, but two more ran forward to replace them.
Caleb fought the men closest to the bow, his strength augmented and currently the match of my own as his attackers flew through the air with each of his blows that connected with them. He looked up and backed into me as several more cultists landed in the spot he had occupied a second ago.
“Shit,” he said, ducking under one of my wings. He headed back to Alexandra, who was still concentrating on collapsing the freighter.
“What do you want?” Alexandra asked, keeping her eyes focused on the freighter. She ignored him even though the blond man was already inches from her face.
“This,” he said, and moved even closer.
His lips met with hers, her eyes fluttering for a moment before sliding shut, the two of them locked together. Although I could not recall from my human life centuries ago ever experiencing that gesture myself, I had seen it many a time among the humans I had observed over the years. I knew it to be a sign of affection, and while I had no such ability in such matters, something dark and uncomfortable inside me stirred.
Unable to process fully what it was, I took my frustration with it out on one of my attackers, dashing my claws at him with such ferocity that his upper half fell away from his lower, both pieces sliding over the front railing of the ship into the ocean all around us.
By the time I moved on to the next of my foes, Alexandra and Caleb had parted once more.
“I wish there was more time for that,” Caleb said, taking her hands in his. “It’s the least I could do, what with you saving all of us.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said, pointing to Rory. We all watched as she pushed two men over the edge of the boat with the dull end of her pole arm.
“It takes a village, after all,” Alexandra continued. “And besides, I wouldn’t exactly call this being saved at the moment.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Caleb said. He pushed farther from her, his hands dropping away. “Hopefully, I can change that.”
Just as quickly as he had gone to her, he fought his way back to the bow of the ship to join me again.
Still unable to process the strange and dark sensation inside me, I resisted the urge to push him into the ocean, possibly in more than two pieces.
“Need your help, big fella,” he said, looking up at the deck high above us.
“You do?” I said, the request catching me off my guard.
Caleb nodded and pointed up to the deck of the freighter. “The freighter is sinking too slow; too many of the Servants of Ruthenia are overrunning our tiny ship here, making it impossible to escape. We’ll be overmatched and overwhelmed by them soon if I don’t do something to give you all a chance to escape.” He looked up at the deck of the ship far above us, more and more men attempting to jump down to our escape vessel every passing second. “I need to get up there.”
I pushed away several more of the cultists, but more scrabbled forward, not necessarily to fight but at least to try to take control of our boat.
“I cannot fly you up there now,” I said. “The others would not be safe.”
“Looks like we’ll have to do this the hard way, then,” Caleb said, spreading his arms straight out to his side. “Hope you’ve got a good pitching arm, then.”
“Pitching . . . ?”
“Never mind,” Caleb said. “I need you to throw me. Just, you know, not into the side of the ship. I can’t help anyone with a broken neck.”
I grabbed him under his shoulders, lifting him with ease, his head raised to the sky. The dark part spoke up again inside me. It would be so easy to just squeeze until my hands met somewhere in the middle of his chest.
Caleb looked down, his eyes face-to-face with mine.
“Watch out for her,” he said, his words full of concern. “Watch out for them all, but her most of all. This isn’t me ordering you . . . This is me asking you.”
“I know,” I said, some of the dangerous new sensation dying in me. “And I shall.”
“Good,” he said, and turned his head back up to the deck above us.
As more men climbed onto our deck by the moment, I took aim and threw the alchemist. Judging the distance in the heat of combat proved difficult; Caleb’s body half hit the deck above, leaving much of him dangling over the side of the freighter.
Caleb pulled himself onto the deck and out of sight, and I found myself with a new problem. With one less person on our side, I was being overrun. Kejetan’s men surrounded me on every side. Their hands pulled my wings and limbs in every direction. I worked my wings, the added weight of those hanging on making it much more difficult a process, but I forced them into motion. Careful not to hit any of my human friends, I extended them, sending the Servants of Ruthenia still holding on into the ocean as they lost their grip on me.
I turned to Alexandra, whose eyes were on the deck of the ship above.
The alchemist stood at the edge, his hands flashing in and out of his coat as he mixed the contents of several vials together.
“Go!” Caleb shouted down at us with a vial clenched in his mouth.
“We’re not leaving without you,” Alexandra called out to him.
“Yes, you are,” he said. The alchemist tilted his head, which poured the contents of the vial into a larger one in his hand before spitting the empty container free. “Stanis, the chain!”
The cultist in front of me blocked my view of where I knew we were still tethered to the ship. My claws sunk into his shoulder as I tore into him, throwing him out of the way and into the hull of the freighter. My other claw came down hard on the chain, slicing through it and sending it sinking into the water.
Fresh hands came down on my arm, and I spun to knock away my new opponent, only to find Alexandra at my side.
“Get him,” she said. “Please.”
Already, men on the deck of the freighter were swarming Caleb while others still attempted to jump down to our boat.
Caleb struggled against the men pulling at him, but kept his footing while he continued working.
“Get them out of here, Stanis,” he said, then looked to Alexandra. “We’ll talk again. If not in this life, the
n the next.”
“Are you sure about that?” Alexandra screamed to him.
He smiled despite the chaos all around him. “As sure as I am about anything.”
I pushed off the hull of the freighter, our boat launching away from it.
“No!” Alexandra called out, the desperation in the tone of her voice sending a bitter pain straight through me.
“I am sorry,” I said. “But we must go.”
“Get him! Please!” she shouted at me.
I shook my head. Caleb had told me to look after them, and with the boat still being boarded by Kejetan’s men, I needed to secure the ship.
“Concentrate on your spell,” I said.
Nothing was going to save the freighter now even if she let it go. Already the prow was lifting into the air as the bulk of it descended beneath the waves.
I turned away and moved to help Marshall, who was wresting the controls back from two of the cultists.
“Screw my spell—” Alexandra started, but the words died in her mouth as a massive explosion wracked the last of the freighter that was still above water.
As I dropped the two men overboard, I watched flame shoot out across what remained of the deck and up into the sky. The reds and yellows mixed with a green light, and although the explosion had been sudden, my eyes had caught the point of its origins.
It had caught Alexandra’s eye as well.
“Caleb!” she screamed.
But the only answer came as the roar of fire mixed with the sounds of the violent waves and our drowning enemies all around us as we headed back to shore and the lights of Manhattan.
Thirty
Alexandra
“L exi,” a voice called out to me, but I didn’t respond.
That was the nice thing about shock. Nobody really expected you to answer while your brain shut down to take a rest from everything that had happened. Well, not completely shut down. Images of the evening flooded my mind, flashes of the crumpling freighter, stone wings, the column of flame amid an ocean of water . . .
And Caleb at the center of it all. Caleb.
“Dead,” I said, simply to acknowledge the fact out loud to myself.
“Lexi!” the voice called out, sharper this time, accompanied by the sensation of someone grabbing my shoulder and shaking me. Rory.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes, and, to my surprise, we were not on the small boat anymore. The rooftop garden of my new building on Saint Mark’s greeted me. I had no idea how I had gotten there, but I was comforted in my grief to see Rory and Marshall to either side of me on one of the park benches there.
“Caleb’s dead,” I said.
“We know,” Stanis said, and I looked up to find him standing ten feet away on the pathway. “Are you unharmed?”
I turned my attention to myself for a moment as I took his question in. “I . . . I think so.” I looked to Rory. “Caleb’s dead.”
She nodded and squeezed my shoulder.
Marshall’s hand fell on my other one. “But not in vain,” he said. “He saved us.”
I stood on shaky legs and walked to Stanis. “You could have saved him,” I said.
“I could not,” he said. “I was honoring Caleb’s actions. As well as honoring his request to watch over you.”
I searched his face, but Stanis was as grave and silent a sentinel as ever. “I hate this,” I said. “Not being able to read you.”
“I am truly sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “When I restore our connection, it won’t matter. Everything will be as it should.” I looked up into Stanis’s eyes. “Do you think it’s over?”
“The threat from my family, yes,” he said.
“Good,” I said, and grief took me over. I collapsed against the smooth cool stone of his chest and lay there, unmoving.
“Lexi,” Rory cried out, pointing up into the air.
Marshall was staring up at the sky as well. “I think you may have called it a little too early on being over,” he said. “Incoming gargoyles!”
All around the rooftop park, branches swayed and shook as wave after wave of gargoyles came down out of the night sky. Although each was terrifying in its own unique way, one stood out among the rest as it landed on the roof and dropped the inert, burned form of Caleb Kennedy at its feet.
I turned my eyes away before I could take in the full extent of the damage to him, turning my fury on the creature who had dared to bring him before us. Had it not, I thought, been enough to watch him engulfed in flames upon the ship’s deck without having to look at his corpse?
As the other gargoyles came down in their clumsy attempts to land, tree limbs snapped and cracked, falling from their trunks. I’d already had one home destroyed, and even though we were outnumbered, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to fight for my new one.
Stanis went for the same lead gargoyle I was heading for, but the reach of my power was closer and quicker, lashing out to the stone surrounding the figure, the bricks of the pathway responding to my command and rising.
The gargoyle stopped, raising its clawed hands against the bricks, and stepped back.
“Please, no!” it said. No, she said, looking to my grotesque. “You told me to seek you out.”
Stanis paused in his advance, his face unsure. I ran to his side, but I held the bricks under my control in the air surrounding the figure.
“Emily . . . ?” Stanis said. “Hoffert.”
“You know this one?” I asked.
He nodded. “We met . . . briefly. She was your brother’s diversionary tactic.”
I looked the slender creature over, its features more batlike than those of Stanis. “You worked for my brother?” I asked, anger rising against my will. The bricks wavered, inching forward around her.
“No!” she said, fear in her voice. “Stanis, please . . .”
My grotesque looked around the roof at the others. “Why did you bring our enemies here to our home?” Stanis demanded.
“They’re not your enemies,” she pleaded. “They’re the same as I . . . confused, scared, unsure.”
I stepped toward her. “You expect me to believe you’re not our enemies when you dare lay our dead friend at your feet?” I shouted. I could contain my rage and sorrow no longer. I hurled one of the bricks through the air at her, but she swiped her claw at it, causing the stone to shatter into fragments.
I expected her to attack in retaliation, but she simply stayed where she stood and lowered her arms. When she spoke, her voice was less fearful but still quiet.
“Your friend,” she said. “He is not dead.”
Of course he is, I thought to myself. I looked down at him once more, examining the burned body I had been so quick to look away from. The tattered remains of Caleb’s clothes were charred with soot—still smoking—but Caleb himself looked untouched except for the few remaining pieces of singed hair that were flaking away.
Even though his eyes were closed and his face unresponsive, the sight of his chest rising and falling caused my legs to give out beneath me. I fell by his side, grabbing him up in my arms, and the bricks under my control fell back to the pathway.
“You’re alive!” I said, pressing him close against me, feeling his heartbeat strengthen as his head stirred against my chest.
“You . . . sure about that . . . ?” he said, his voice weak. The last word was barely out of his mouth when he fell into a fit of coughing that ended with him spitting out a thick black liquid onto the roof.
“Pretty,” Rory said as she joined us, Marshall at her side.
I pushed away from him, holding his weakened body away from me at arm’s length so I could look him over. “How? How is it possible?”
“We watched you go kaboom,” Marshall added.
“I’m not sure,” Caleb said. “I watched me go kaboom, too.” He went quiet for a moment, lost in his own thoughts before speaking again. “Do you remember when I told you about the spell I used to bind myself to the two ships
? How I had trouble driving a blade into my own skin when I needed the blood for the binding?”
I nodded.
He marveled at the smooth but unharmed skin of his arms and hands. “Years of ingesting alchemical mixes must have had more of an effect on me than I thought,” he said. “I guess my body is a bit more resilient than I previously would have imagined.”
Caleb ran his hand along the burned edge of what remained of his right pant leg, which was cut off just above his knee.
“You look like the Incredible Hulk after he changes back into Bruce Banner,” Marshall said.
“After surviving that explosion,” he said, “I feel like the Hulk.”
I hugged him hard, but not too hard. I’d hate for him to have survived an explosion only to break his ribs in my overzealousness at finding him alive still.
As I released Caleb, Rory caught him as he lay back down.
I stood, turning to this new gargoyle. “If you aren’t here to cause trouble, why are you here?”
Her wings flitted with nerves, and though she looked on the verge of taking to the sky once more, she held her ground. “Stanis told me to find him,” she said.
“I did indeed tell you to seek me out, Emily,” Stanis said. “But who are these others?”
Although this other creature was a gargoyle, her body moved like that of an uncomfortable young woman, something I was all too familiar with.
“Many of these others were promised the same safety that Devon promised for allegiance to him,” she said. “And others were like me . . . alone, scared, confused. So when you told me to seek you out, I did. When I saw the ship ablaze, I rescued this man you had been working with and followed you and your friends back to the city.” The gargoyle turned to me, looking down into my eyes. “I am sorry to intrude, but I—and many others—have questions we need answered.”
I could not help but smile. “It is no worry, Emily,” I said. “A polite gargoyle is welcome here anytime, unlike the kind you first aligned yourself with.”
“There is much to discuss,” Stanis said, “but you must forgive me a moment, Emily. I must speak with my maker’s kin privately.”