Their hands and feet each had only three digits, but the tips of their talons sunk into the stone as they circled me, tearing into the bridge with bursts of sparks. My Darling and Dear jacket might have been able to fend those claws off, but if they struck my legs, I would instantly become a double-amputee—highly likely, given that I had no magic to shield myself.
Oh, and they were naked, showing off their dangly, awe-inspiring, manana sundaes. I narrowed my eyes, locking onto my obvious targets—their low-hanging fruit, as it were.
I would use my boots to put their cherries on top of their vaunted dessert dishes.
Their fiery, crimson eyes flickered menacingly, and they looked to hate me almost as much as I currently hated them. They’d just thrown my Mask and my brand-new sidekick off the bridge—all when I’d expected at least an hour of respite. Maybe Xylo’s interaction with the Mask had flared up like a beacon, drawing their attention.
“Haven’t you heard how rude it is to interrupt people when they are talking?” I demanded.
Rather than trade dialogue, they let out a simultaneous roar and thundered directly towards me—using their wings to make every third step a super-jump to cover more distance.
I stood motionless, timing the lead gargoyle’s advance, and abruptly sprinted at him right as he started taking a super-jump. My abrupt motion allowed me to intercept him in mid-leap, before he could react, introducing his throat to my rising blade sooner than he’d anticipated.
His head fell to the stone, bouncing once before crumbling to gravel.
One of the other gargoyles slapped me in the lower back, grazing across my ass on the follow-through. My eyes bulged open as wide as saucers—more surprised than anything—as my girl-at-the-bar instincts kicked in.
Stop! Cherry time.
I spun, lunging out with my foot to kick him squarely in the groin. My foot hit him so hard that, not only did I put his cherries on top, my boot reduced his entire pelvic region to gravel. The force of the blow even surprised me. Especially when his stone banana broke completely off and fell to the ground.
He gasped and screamed, clutching at his ruined crotch with both claws, trying to keep any more of his genitals from falling.
The third gargoyle roared and struck me in my sword arm, batting the Silver blade out of my grip. I hissed angrily and jumped back a step in order to square off against my last opponent. But he didn’t wait, already swiping one set of wicked claws at my right thigh. It hit me and I gasped in horror, having zero desire to see my leg resting on the ground like a drumstick beside his gargoyle wang.
But the pain I imagined from such a wound…
Never came.
I glanced down to see that my leg was perfectly intact. My pants were ripped where his claws had struck me, but my flesh only showed three red welts. We both stared at that for a few seconds, neither of us entirely sure what to make of it.
Then two more fucking gargoyles landed on the bridge, and these guys were the A-Team, each taller than the first trio, wielding dual axes and wearing what looked like capri pants. One look at them told me they were hardened killers and wouldn’t be as easily defeated as the naked Three Amigos.
One had bird shit splattered on his forehead, so I subconsciously dubbed him Shithead. I spun back to the last surviving naked gargoyle and gave him a triple rabbit-punch to the throat. He flung his hands up, wheezing and gasping for air. I grabbed him by the wings and yanked downwards as I jumped up with my knee, driving it straight into his chin and snapping the lower half of his jaw clear off. He went limp and I quickly let go as he fell over the railing of the bridge like a bag of wet laundry.
I scooped up my katana and spun back to the axe-wielding gargoyles, hoping I could take them out fast enough that I could get off this damned bridge and find my way down to wherever Xylo had landed with my Mask.
So it caught me completely by surprise to see an ivory projectile suddenly shoot past me from over my shoulder to strike Shithead in the eye. He roared, swinging wildly with one of his axes hard enough to accidentally chop off his nameless buddy’s wing. The amputated gargoyle instantly wailed in agony—revealing an orthodontist’s wet dream of short, crooked nubs for teeth—as his severed wing crashed to the ground in a shower of gravel and dust.
And then another ivory projectile whipped past me to hit the amputated gargoyle directly in the tonsils, turning his wail into a choking cough as he gagged and struggled to breathe through the slightly curved—for her pleasure—footlong throat-rocket. I instantly dubbed him Deepthroat as he collapsed to his knees, dropping both axes in the process. His fiery eyes flickered weakly as he looked torn about whether he should first dislodge the ivory missile from his throat or tourniquet his amputated wing stub.
I spun to look behind me, wondering what fresh new hell I was about to face—
And I gaped in disbelief, my gast entirely flabbered. If my brain had been an old PC—like my father had kept around the house for a decade too long—it would have fizzled and rebooted with a mild, melted plastic aroma and that haunting start-up music everyone kept in their memory banks for only the worst of their nightmares—right alongside the old dial-up-internet jingle.
Because Xylo was perched in a crouch atop the ledge, impersonating Frodo’s bestie, Gollum—his bone face somehow managing to snarl nightmarishly at the two gargoyles like they’d just stolen his precious ring. He also had his crimson cowl up like a hood, covering his head to show only his menacing look but still bunching around his shoulders like some kind of refugee, crazy-ass assassin. I finally understood what the ivory projectiles had been, because I watched in fascinated horror as Xylo deftly snapped off one of his own ribs before hurling it at the miserable gargoyles. The curved rib made a continuous whoosh-whoosh sound as it whipped past me like a boomerang before clocking Shithead in the ankles hard enough to knock him completely off his feet—so that he had the unique opportunity of falling face-first onto the stone bridge before he had the chance to use his wings.
Shithead also dropped one of his axes in his fall, and the heavy blade neatly sliced off Deepthroat’s foot. His gagging turned into a hacking, high-pitched shriek and he decided it was time to put an end to friendly fire. He pounced on Shithead—Xylo’s rib bone still lodged in his throat—and began pummeling Shithead’s face with his fists, gravel ricocheting off the ground and ledge of the bridge like shrapnel.
Shithead finally went limp, and Deepthroat wasn’t far behind him, collapsing onto his back for a quick breather.
Of course, his wing stub hit the ground first and he belted out a high-pitched keening sound before promptly passing out. I shook my head in disbelief, spinning back to Xylo.
“How in the hell did you make it all the way back up here so fast?” I demanded, wondering exactly what to make of his return. If his true purpose had been to steal my Mask, he wouldn’t have come back to me.
His face slowly returned to normal—looking as if it took some mental effort or strain—and he shrugged bashfully, hopping down from the ledge to stand upright. “I climbed the tower,” he said, pointing back at the tower we hadn’t explored yet—the one he’d been guarding earlier—with the locked door.
I blinked at him a few times. “You just climbed the tower…” I repeated flatly.
He nodded, lowering his hood to settle back around his shoulders. The dark smoke in his eyes still shifted and swirled as if alive. “I figured you might need help since you no longer have your powers, so I did what I could. I felt them hitting you, so I came back as quickly as I knew how. Climbing the tower.”
I shook my head, not certain I liked the sound of that. He’d felt the gargoyles hitting me? I hadn’t felt him falling or hitting the ground, so it wasn’t a shared feeling, thankfully. I glanced down at my leg again, wondering why I still had it. Then I slowly looked up at Xylo’s bone leg. Then his neck where I’d decapitated him. All the damage I’d dealt him had only impacted his joints, not fracturing any of his bones.
Like his
actual bones were impervious to damage.
Maybe…our strange bond had given me some of his resilience? Made me stronger somehow? That blow from the gargoyle should have at least shredded through my flesh. And I’d done some serious damage with my fists and feet.
Against stone.
I shook my head, realizing that we were still standing out in the open where we had just killed five gargoyles. We needed to get away from the bridge before reinforcements came to check on them. And I needed to go find my Horseman’s Mask at the base of the bridge. “Let’s go. We need to get out of sight quickly.”
He nodded obediently. “Let me just go pick up my ribs.”
He took two steps and then came to an abrupt halt with one boot still in the air. He slowly lowered it, grunting to himself as if surprised by a sudden thought. He stood still for a few moments and then cocked his head and raised his hand. His ribs suddenly ripped out of the distant gargoyles and hammered back into place on his own body, reattaching themselves with a flare of embers and sparks. I felt nothing, so the shared sensations were definitely only on his end. I shook my head in wonder but tried to keep the concern from my face as Xylo turned back to look at me—his face expressionless again. I approached and motioned for him to lead us away from the bridge, back to the first tower we had explored.
Instead, he grabbed my hand and pressed something cool into my palm.
I glanced down to see the butterfly charm.
Silence stretched between us and what felt like a lead blanket was abruptly removed from my shoulders.
“Thank you, Xylo,” I whispered, relieved on multiple levels—that he had it in the first place, and that he was so casual about returning it.
He hadn’t ever wanted it for himself—or Dracula.
He gave me an intent look—as if reading my thoughts—and shook his head. “I’m fairly certain that I should be thanking you. I’ve never felt so…” he trailed off, glancing down at his hands. The black smoke in his eye-sockets shifted and eddied wildly as if suddenly disturbed.
“Alive?” I suggested.
He considered that and finally shrugged. “Perhaps. It’s rather confusing and loud. Is that what life feels like?”
I smiled crookedly, realizing that it was pretty damned accurate as definitions go. “Yeah.”
I was pretty sure his strength had somehow made my skin tougher, and I was beyond grateful for it. Because that blow to my back—the one that had felt like someone swatting my ass—might have just proven fatal without Xylo’s energy boost from our bond.
But it wasn’t as tough as Xylo’s bones. I still had welts, so I wasn’t entirely immune to harm like he was.
I wasn’t sure if this was a good development in the long run or not, but I was perfectly content focusing on the short run victories for the next few days.
“You’re a pretty good shot, Xylo. A dead-eye, as a matter of fact.”
He grunted, motioning for me to follow him into the tower. “I see better from a distance. If you can’t fight up close, you fight from afar.”
And he drummed his fingers across his ribs in a knick-knack paddy-whack, give a dog a bone beat, seeming to smile back at me mischievously. I laughed, shaking my head.
Yeah. He’d earned a drum solo.
Chapter 14
Tendrils of thick mist curled and slithered through the graveyard, questing and searching aimlessly so that the tips of the tombstones resembled shark fins breaching the surface of the water in the ocean. Xylo and I were currently crouched down beneath that mist, and I grimaced distastefully as my fingers sunk into the moist, thick earth. The ground was pregnant with water—and probably the remains of those buried beneath our boots.
We remained absolutely silent as we watched the nearby patrol of…well, frogmen, I guess.
I wasn’t entirely sure what they were, but they looked like humanoid, bipedal, warrior frogs. They carried algae-coated tridents in their webbed hands and wore whips at their hips that looked to be made of spare frog tongues—a coiled, gelatinous cord that glistened in the light of the crimson moon.
Xylo had informed me that not only did the whips stick to their targets like hot tar, but they could only be removed by a spoken word from one of the frogmen—some kind of magic. They were also acidic and could eat through flesh and armor upon contact.
Neither of us were sure what that might mean for me after our bond had strengthened my skin, but to be on the safe side, I made the executive decision to not let them hit me with their sticky tongue whips.
I counted twelve of the tall bastards walking around on their massive webbed feet—easy to audibly track due to the wet slapping sound they emitted with each step. They wore a strange scaled armor that Xylo warned was impervious to blades—only breakable by iron hooks—and wide, conical hats made from lily pads that looked like those old Asian straw hats worn by rice farmers for shade. Their golden, bulbous eyes seemed to glow from beneath the brims, and I found myself thinking of how accurately frogs could catch flies with a casual flick of their tongue.
I bet their whips were just as accurate.
I wondered if they were some creature from Fae or something Dracula had personally made. I had never heard of anything like them, and that typically put it into the Fae category in my personal experience. But this place was a brave new world to me.
Xylo wasn’t sure of their origins either, telling me that Dracula simply called them frogs. Then again, Dracula called the werewolves wolves, and the vampires children. He wasn’t very big on titles or anything, apparently.
Like they were all so far beneath him that he simply couldn’t be bothered to learn their names or histories, let alone their flavor of creature. They existed only to serve him, and he let them crash on his couch as payment.
We were currently surrounded by several pairs of the glacially slow patrols, forcing us to hide in the cemetery just outside the Village—which was the actual name of the place, by the way—I had seen from the bridge. Since we didn’t want to kill them and risk raising an alarm for all their buddies, we were pretty much stuck in the cemetery until we could be certain we were in the clear.
Which was just excellent since we had so much free time before we had to get to work.
I leaned closer to Xylo. “You should take off the red scarf. It’s like waving a flag to point out our location,” I breathed, annoyed at the delay.
The ridges above his smoky eye sockets bunched down with a faint grinding sound. “No. It is mine,” he muttered louder than I would have wished. I was also surprised to see him—ironically—show a little backbone for once.
I studied him, keeping the frogmen in my peripheral vision. “Is it sentimental from your past?” I asked in what I hoped passed for an apologetic or sympathetic whisper.
His features gradually softened as he shook his head. “No. It is armor.” I must have looked doubtful, because he gritted his teeth, looking annoyed. “It is resilient against blades and other weapons down here. It is dyed with the blood of one-thousand innocents,” he said, matter-of-factly.
I blinked. Oh. “Wow…where did you get it?” I asked, doubting Dracula would have just given him something that had obviously taken a lot of work to create.
Then again, the blood of a thousand innocents soaking a cloth long enough to dye the fabric essentially made it a soiled dinner napkin that Dracula had never washed after using it for three meals a day, every day, for a year. Given that he was immortal, he might have hundreds of others just like it.
Xylo glanced over, relaxing his shoulders. I was surprised to see him get so worked up over my request. “Apologies. It’s just…well, it’s the only constant I’ve ever known. My oldest memory from my first day here. Dracula gave it to me as a welcoming gift when I awoke.”
I nodded with an understanding smile. “It’s okay. I didn’t realize or I never would have suggested it. We’ll just be extra careful,” I told him, silently wondering exactly how Xylo’s arrival here had worked. He said he’d awo
ken here…
So…where had he been before?
And how long ago had that been? None of the other skeletons had worn scarves, so why had Dracula given one to Xylo? Not wanting to alert the frogmen, I kept these questions to myself to ask him later.
Silence settled between us as we continued to watch the frogmen.
With nothing else to do, I scanned the horizon, recalling the last hour of our walk after descending the tower where we’d killed the gargoyles. I spotted the Coliseum-looking structure in the far distance and I wondered if we would get to see it up close—or if that was unwise. This wasn’t a sight-seeing trip, after all.
A massive Clocktower rose in the distance, easily twenty stories tall and resembling a miniature Big Ben from London—but sculpted in the style of Notre Dame with sinister gargoyles and harsh spikes jutting out from around the face of the glowing silver clock itself. Dracula had said he’d have the Clocktower toll six times when dinner was ready.
I narrowed my eyes, shaking off the thought. I had a long way to go before worrying about dinner.
Instead, I replayed my conversation with Xylo as we’d left the tower with the dead gargoyles, feeling my shoulders grow tense as I remembered some of the things he’d told me.
Xylo had opened up quite a bit after I’d managed to break his bond with Dracula. Not that he’d suddenly begun talking crap on his old boss or anything—there had never been any animosity in his tone when he spoke of his hellish service to Dracula—because it was all he had ever known. He didn’t have an example of anything better, so he didn’t know enough to realize he was supposed to feel a certain way about his unique treatment.
Because Xylo quite literally knew nothing about who he had been before—his oldest memory was his first day here in Castle Dracula. All he knew was his time spent with Dracula as the outcast skeleton who couldn’t fight worth a damn.
Essentially, he had been singled out from his brother skeletons as the joke of the castle. The court jester. Dracula had regularly given him impossible tasks or errands, only to watch him obviously fail and then hand him over to the werewolves as punishment.
Godless: Feathers and Fire Book 7 Page 8