by Krista Walsh
Jeff grimaced. “Guess we should have attacked those chanters last. Come on.”
Keeping tight hold of her hand, he hurried between the yawning chasm and Raul’s sharp teeth, searching for anyone they knew. Wasn’t this why Maggie, Brady, and William were here?
“You!” A stranger’s voice shouted in their direction. Fingers were pointed and a wall of Raul’s followers formed between Jeff and his friends.
“Well, shit,” said Jeff. “Not fast enough.”
Cassie stepped in front of him.
“Novice Murphy, this is excellent work,” spoke the man in the front. He pulled back his hood to reveal a withered face that had spent so much time exposed to the elements, his skin appeared leathered. His beard and scraggly hair blended with the white hue of the snow, or would have if hair and snow were clean. “You managed to catch the greatest prize of the battle. You’ve earned yourself a promotion.”
Cassie frowned. “You can stuff your promotion. You are all a crazy bunch of—of—” she stopped, unable to come up with anything bad enough to suit their level of insanity. “Loons! If you come one step closer to him, you’re going to get more than you bargained for.”
Jeff had seen Cassie in action and knew that against one person she had a good advantage. But against them all? He pulled his satchel closer, felt his fingers burn as they brushed the leather and realised one of the vials must have broken or leaked. He hoped there were enough left to get them out of this mess.
The vortex grew another foot as it swallowed up the massive oak tree in the village, the long roots catching people in their whip-like arms as the tree tore backwards into nothingness.
The wizened leader smiled in a grim sort of way, expressing a parental disappointment. With a wave of his hand, the group behind him moved forward, all chanting something that Jeff assumed would have negative effects on his and Cassie’s persons. Hoping he grabbed one of the better vials, he ignored the prickling sensation running over his skin, and pulled Cassie back with his free hand.
“Jeff, what—” she started, but without bothering to explain, he popped the top of the vial with his thumb and launched it into the centre of the crowd, backing up as fast as they could before it landed and cracked. A yellow cloud ballooned around Raul’s followers and they grabbed at their throats, falling to their knees with shrieks that tore through Jeff’s conscience as their skin bubbled and peeled.
“I’ll have to thank Maggie,” said Jeff. “Speaking of which.”
The followers who’d avoided the worst of the cloud continued to pursue them, but with enough of a window to escape, Jeff and Cassie disappeared into the fight and manoeuvred around the worst of it, throwing elbows, punches, and some of Cassie’s aikido where needed.
Jeff finally caught sight of Brady up ahead. He was moving in ways Jeff wouldn’t have recognised in the counsellor, able to predetermine his enemy’s next move and sidestep the blows before they came. His lips still moved in that silent incantation, and Jeff looked up to see the grey-skinned dragons flying loops around Raul’s head, keeping him distracted from the people below.
“Brady!” he called.
The white-eyed counsellor cocked his head towards the sound of Jeff’s voice, despite the distance from where he stood.
“What’s wrong with Brady?” Cassie asked. “Did he develop superpowers while I was gone?”
“Dragon brain,” Jeff explained. “He’s less Brady at the moment and more Talfyr.”
“Huh,” said Cassie, keeping it simple.
They reached Brady’s side, and Jeff threw another vial, this one less cloudy and more slippery, so the ground turned oil-slick and the followers couldn’t keep their balance, sliding into one another like first-time skaters.
“Any chance your other form will make an appearance?” Jeff shouted towards Brady. “We could use all the help we can get here.”
Brafyr’s white gaze shifted to him. Without answering, he tilted his head back towards the sky.
Jeff and Cassie followed his gaze, and Jeff grinned as a familiar green shape appeared overhead. Compared to his bland, grey-scaled brothers, Talfyr shone like a gem, his iridescent scales flashing in the wintry light. He reeled around the stone dragon’s head, the force of his wings knocking the skull off balance. Jeff noticed the slowness with which Talfyr ducked and darted in the air, the wobble to his frame as he lifted back up to herd the other three dragons closer to Raul.
“I will do what I can, but cannot do much better in my form than you are currently doing in yours.”
Jeff bristled. He thought he’d been doing none too shabby, fuck you very much. But he supposed in the eyes of an ancient dragon, a bit of hocus pocus was hardly something to be impressed by. Talfyr’s injured wing would hinder him, but hopefully not so much that he couldn’t keep the younger dragons in check.
“And what about the magic?” Jeff continued, his thoughts moving to the expanding rift. “Where is Maggie? Can you guys work on closing the vortex?”
Brady’s attention flicked towards the growing chasm, and he nodded. “I will find her.”
Without looking towards the crowd, he pushed through the fallen followers, keeping his feet on the slick surface, and went off to find Maggie.
Cassie shook her head. “And I thought that man couldn’t get any stranger.”
Jeff reached for her hand and winced, holding up his fingers to see the skin blistered through.
“Are you all right?” Cassie asked.
“For now. Let’s make another attempt to get out of here, shall we? I’d really like to survive to hear how this ends.”
The path guarded by Raul and the road blocked by the vortex, they ducked behind the cottages, darting around the skirmishes that had broken up between houses. But either they got turned around or the vortex was growing faster than Jeff could believe, because they couldn’t avoid the force of the wind. The centre of the rift stared out at them, a great eye of nothingness, as if to stare back for too long would be to lose yourself where you stood. Around the nothingness, in the swirling light, were indistinguishable shapes, something lurking just behind, like under a rippling surface.
Cassie yanked on his arm, and Jeff pulled his mind away from the rift. They had to get out of there.
Allowing Cassie to take the lead, they ran through another row of small cottages, until the followers and soldiers were nowhere to be seen. They stopped to catch their breath, knowing the reprieve wouldn’t last long.
“I don’t remember the village being this big,” Jeff said between gasps.
“They’ve been building,” Cassie replied. “Non-stop for three months. They found me out in the snow after the Sisters sent me away. I managed to convince them I was on some sort of pilgrimage to find them, and they accepted me as one of their own. I don’t think I would have pulled it off if they weren’t so completely psychotic.”
While they had their moment, before the chaos followed them into the calm, Jeff wrapped his arm around Cassie’s waist and pulled her close. This time without the urgency, he kissed her, putting every ounce of his week of longing, his love, his ache for her into it. She melted against him, her mouth warm compared to the biting wind. His arms felt complete, his heart felt complete—everything in this moment felt right. Felt perfect. If the vortex swept them up right then, he didn’t think he would care.
But the sound of fighting drew closer, and reality barged in.
With a groan of frustration at having to pull away, Jeff kept Cassie close as they hurried down the row. Behind them, Raul and the mountain loomed, to their left, the vortex, and somewhere in the middle were his friends, hopefully still fighting for their lives.
Between each house, they saw the rift grow larger, more leering.
The battle shifted farther and farther from the vortex, trying to keep ahead of that strengthening pull, but the only way for them to go was closer to Raul. They were running out of space, and more and more people were disappearing.
Jeff peered around
one of the cottages, scanning for familiar faces. Was Jayden one of the ones caught up in the rift? Jasmine? Venn? He couldn’t see any of them in the rush and panic.
A hint of strawberry blonde hair let him know Ariana was still fighting, but she was too close to the vortex. He could see her straining to keep going, not just with the sword in her hand, but against the force of the wind pulling her back. Her boots skidded against the snow and she braced herself, shouted as the sword was ripped out of her hands and sucked backwards.
Jeff wished there was something he could do. Anything that would help them.
An idea popped into his mind.
“Jeff, what are you thinking? We need to get moving.”
“I need to do something first. And I’ll need your help.”
She followed him without question to the porch of one of the cottages. Jeff knew nothing was strong enough to escape the pull if an ancient tree, roots included, had already been torn up, but maybe it would buy Ariana some time.
He took the pouch from his waist and opened the seal, allowing the blue smoke to trail outwards. The binding spell paused, for a moment drifted towards the rift, and Jeff worried his plan had failed before it even started. But then the smoke shifted back, moving in a straight line towards something it could cling to.
A soldier lost his footing, got caught up in the wind, but crashed into the smoke and stuck, like a fly in a web.
Jeff and Cassie let out a whoop of triumph, and watched as the spell continued to cross the village and wrapped itself around another old tree, this one a few metres wide. Once the distance from cottage to tree was crossed, Jeff awkwardly made a grab at the smoke, doing his best to convince the blue tendrils that they wanted to attach to the railing of the porch and not creep up his arm. Cassie helped pry it off and guide it, and between the two of them, they had the net secured across the length of the village
Jeff pulled the string closed on the pouch, trapping in whatever was left of the seemingly endless amount of binding spell, and reattached it to his belt.
“Now we can go,” he said.
His conscience continued to fight against him as he looked across the fields stretching out from the village. It looked like thousands of people, clashing head to head and toe to toe against each other, man and undead beast. Screams, death, blood spray.
In the full light of day, this was the stuff of nightmares that would haunt him and inspire his dreams for the rest of his life, and here he was leaving his friends behind to do their best and fare thee well. He felt like an asshole, but weighed it against how much worse he would feel if Raul’s followers got their hands on him and succeeded in their sacrifice. With the dragons still temporarily on their side, at least they stood a chance. But Jeff wondered how long the alliance would last. Already, black smoke billowed, and the heavy reek of sulphur filled the air as they released their fire breath on the fields around Raul.
“We’ll head to the horses and wait it out. Maybe find a way to help from there. If we can get close enough up the back path, we can trap the dragon with more of the binding spell.”
Cassie grinned as they hurried back behind the houses. “Look at you with all the plans.”
Jeff laughed. “Like I’ve been saying to… well, myself, I’m getting better at this.”
No sooner had he spoken the words when his breath caught in his chest, and his feet stumbled.
The blade that slid between his ribs was cold. Before the pain set in, it felt like his bones froze as they touched the metal. Every vein, every blood vessel turning to solid ice as they were sliced through.
Everything around him slowed. He heard Cassie scream, but his own mind was in too much shock to work through the steps of pushing sound through his vocal chords. Looking down, he saw the point of a sword protruding through his side. A second grinding sensation as the blade retracted. Instinctively, he reached for the wound, and his hands came away covered in blood. Behind him, he heard his name, and then a scuffle as the screamer tackled someone else to the ground. Somehow, he managed to shift his feet to turn around, and saw Ariana with her knee in Darcy’s back, pulling his arms tight behind him.
“Time to end the cycle, Creator,” Darcy spat. “With you dead, none of this happens anymore. Learn your place.”
He prepared to offer insult to injury by spitting in Jeff’s face, but Ariana hit him over the head with the butt of her sword, and he collapsed in a heap in the snow.
Cassie, tears in her eyes, rushed to Jeff’s side as he wavered on his feet. She swam in his vision, but those night-sky blue eyes remained clear.
“I’m so sorry,” Ariana said around her panic. “I was watching him and Sophie, but I was attacked, and he got away. I couldn’t catch him. I’m so sorry. Jeff, it’ll be all right.”
Cassie nodded. “She’s right. We’ll find Maggie. Or there’s got to be a goddamned healer on this field. What army would ride without a healer?”
She looked around her as if she expected the healer in question to pop up by her side, and grew hysterical when none did.
Ariana rested a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll go find one. Don’t worry.”
Her final words were unnecessary. Jeff was past the point of worrying, and Cassie was already worrying enough for the three of them. Faintly he chuckled, and then stumbled on his feet.
“Jeff!” Cassie cried out, and Ariana was back by her side.
At first he wondered why they sounded so scared that he had fallen. He’d already been stabbed, what would a couple of bruised knees do?
The bruises never came, and he understood their screams. He hadn’t landed, carried on the force of a wind that gusted below his feet, hovering a few inches above the ground.
Fear pushed through the pain and shock as he felt the tug of the rift hauling him closer. Cassie and Ariana grabbed at him, holding him by the wrists and pulling him back, but their own footing was precarious, and Jeff felt torn in two, with far more force pulling him backwards than forwards. It was only a matter of time before the women slipped and came with him.
“Let go!” he yelled.
Both of them refused, but he saw Cassie trip, knew she was running out of time. With the surge of adrenaline rushing through him, he found the strength to give them both a solid shove.
“No!” Cassie shrieked as she lost hold of him. She lunged to grab him again, but Ariana held her back.
Jeff sprang away from them, and cried out as he hit the ground, right on the bleeding wound in his side. He scrabbled at the frozen earth, clawing his fingernails into the snow to try to hold himself steady. Above him, the blue smoke of the binding spell wavered, and he tried to gain his footing to grab onto it. He got to one foot, but another gust of wind blew him off balance and he fell again.
The rift grew larger as he got closer, the void looking less like an eye and more like a gaping mouth.
More screams sounded behind him as the stone dragon broke through the four living dragons and shook the earth as it crossed the field, one step after another.
It’s like he’s coming after me, Jeff thought.
There was purpose in those empty eye sockets as the skeleton stomped closer, soldiers and followers alike crushed under the bony feet.
Jeff felt sick. The force of the vortex, the agony in his side as he was torn across the hard ground, the smell of death in the air. When would it stop? Was Darcy right?
Raul released a final bellow of rage and swung his tail, catching more men and women with the bony spines, impaling them or throwing them backwards. Arrows flew at him with no effect, swords clashed against his toes with more damage to the blade than to him.
Another idea flashed through the chaos in Jeff’s thoughts as the vortex overshadowed him, only a few seconds away from swallowing him. Fingers fumbling with his belt, he opened the pouch again, aimed the binding spell at Raul.
Either it saves me, or I save them, he thought.
The blue smoke crawled slower than he’d ever seen it, and his feet hit the ed
ge of the rift, going numb with cold. He refused to look to see if they were still attached to his body. The stone dragon stomped closer, and the binding spell wrapped around its toe. Jeff lurched to a halt, his shoulders yanked in their sockets. He grimaced and held on tight, his knuckles turning white around the pouch.
Raul didn’t notice the spell until the tendrils crept up his leg and started towards a wing. It grew like mould on cheese, like ivy up the side of a house, overwhelming everything with its desire to spread and grow. The dragon stepped backwards to try to escape it, and Jeff felt himself tugged out of the rift, feeling coming back into his feet like pins and needles. Relief flooded his chest even as his side screamed out with pain. Pain he could deal with. Pain was life. For a while.
He saw Brady, Maggie, and William nearby, standing with four strangers that Jeff assumed were enchanters from the other Houses. They chanted in a foreign language at the vortex to close it. Through Raul’s skyscraper legs, Jeff saw the dwindling numbers of the army, now dealing with the grey-scaled dragons who had lost most of their interest in Raul and already turned their attention to the food on the field. Talfyr flew around them, snapping at their wings, but they ignored him. There were too many threats. Too many risks. His friends could never manage all of them at once.
Vortex first.
Jeff felt the world tilt, grow smaller and then expand. His mind reeled with the sudden movement, even though he knew he hadn’t moved at all. He hoped it was their spell working. As the binding spell pulled him slowly away from the rift, he prayed the lurch in the world was the vortex closing behind him.
But in his bleeding gut, he knew he couldn’t be that lucky. Life never dealt the easy hands. Reluctantly, he looked over his shoulder and saw the rift had grown wider. Another gust blew beneath him and, to his horror, Raul staggered forwards, pulled by the binding spell, which itself had been caught up by the vortex.