by G. D. Penman
She cast a barrier overhead. “One.”
It was joined by angled shields of more complexity a little further out. “Two.”
Ogden snatched control of her barrier, layering on more and more complex protections. Sully started scribbling out spell fragments that drifted in a slow orbit around her. “Three.”
Mol Kalath smashed into her and Sully tumbled up over its head to land spread-eagled over its back. The soldiers and Ogden sprinted forward. At the far end of the street spellfire flared up. Another team was making its attack. Luck. Damned luck again. With one painful yank on the demon’s feathers, Sully sat up on its back and started casting concussions.
Some of the Fae had drifted off to face the rattling guns down the street but there were still more than enough standing guard. One wiped away their barriers with a flick of its wrist as if they’d never been cast. Then the dying started. The soldiers with Ogden had been briefed on tactics, but they quickly reverted to their training. They were trying to aim shots at bodies that had already vanished. The first time that one of the Fae sprang into being amongst them there wasn’t even time for them to respond before it had blinked away again. There had been a soldier where it appeared, and now there was just a tattered wet sheet of skin tumbling to the ground. Sully was flinging out curses so fast that her throat was starting to ache, but none of them could make contact. She was even more useless than Ogden’s squad. Ogden was throwing up shields to deflect the worst of the Fae’s spells, but they were being torn down just as quickly. Sully launched a barrage of white fire out at the Fae to strip away any magical defenses, but it splashed across the street without making contact with anything at all.
For humans, magic took time and ritual. For the demons, it was about channeling the raw power of the cosmos. But for the Fae it came as readily as a thought. They could reach out with their will and snatch the spells away. Turn them aside or contort them into something new. Sully saw one catch a bolt of Ogden’s lightning and toss it back as a jagged-edged sickle of black ice to neatly bisect one of the soldiers in a crimson spray. If they’d had a moment to think, the Fae could have just remade the world without bullets or enemies in it, so Sully had to make sure that they never had that moment. She was far from idle as they made their desperate charge, but she was painfully aware that her spells weren’t going to turn the tide. The best she could hope for was to distract them long enough for the mission to be completed.
Sully saw only one of the Fae fall, and that was just because a soldier misfired into a space where it happened to appear. Damned luck. By the time that other weapons were trained on the spot the pale tangle of gangly limbs on the ground had already healed itself and vanished again.
There were only six soldiers left, running along beside Mol Kalath. Ogden had taken flight to lay down covering fire now that his shields had proven completely useless, and he was giving the Fae a run for their money. Every spell that they launched at him skimmed by harmlessly and every time one of them leapt into the air beside him they found he had already darted out of reach. Up ahead, three of the Fae were still lounging around the doorway to the Archive, making no move to stop the intruders. Sully gritted her teeth. They weren’t even scared. They should have been.
Mol Kalath’s bounding steps faltered as Sully sucked the power out of the demon in a rush. There was no circle here to bind the Inferno in—no way to know how far it would travel in the moment that it was lit or if it would rush back at her—but Sully didn’t give a damn. She was going to make the bastards burn. She was going to make them pay. Mol Kalath’s fury boiled up into her with its power like the righteous anger of people ground under the heel of oppression for too long. Generations upon generations living in dread, coming to a head here. The demon leapt forward one final step ahead of the three screaming soldiers who were still charging and Sully let it all out.
White light, brighter than the smog-dimmed sun above them, flared out from her outstretched hand. For a moment there was silence, then the fire died and the roar washed over them. The soldiers toppled over backward. Ogden was slapped across the sky to batter against the buildings on the far side of the road. Only the black beast beneath her stopped Sully from being flung to the road too. It had hunched down and locked its claws into the cobbles. Smoke rushed out toward them, almost lost in the huge black spot that the Inferno had left in their vision.
The Fae up ahead were gone and so were the upper levels of the building, sheared clean off the surface of the earth by the impossible heat, leaving only a blueprint of the walls in glowing molten stone.
Raw magic rushed up through the elevator shaft, drawn by the vacuum inside Sully and her demon. She ran her hand absentmindedly across its feathers and tried to remember its name. They bounded forward again and Sully at least had the wherewithal to scream back over her shoulder, “Charge!”
Three Fae stood behind Sully, their fingers embedded in the corpses splayed in the streets. Reshaping them into abstract statues of gory sinew and graven bone. Six huge almond-shaped eyes, black as midnight, stared right into her as pain and memory flooded back through her mind, carrying a wave of terror along for the ride. She was alone with them again.
Mol Kalath did not slow, even as the burned-out husk of the building seared its feet and scorched its feathers. It carried them forward to the brink of the precipice. Then Sully twisted to raise her surviving middle finger to the Fae before she vanished out of sight into the warm comforting darkness of the elevator shaft.
Demon and woman clung to each other as they spun down through the pitch blackness. It was a more comforting embrace than Sully had ever found with her conquests, her girlfriends, or even her own mother. It occurred to her that she’d completely forgotten to say goodbye to Gormlaith before she went off to war, but that seemed entirely appropriate given their history. She drew in a deep sulfurous breath through Mol Kalath’s feathers and let strength and power flow back into her from the endless font beneath them. Her flying spell caught them before they hit the ground. There were no guards down here in this beige corridor, but Sully supposed that made sense. The Fae wouldn’t use elevators when they could travel at the speed of thought. The moment they were through the portal, the Fae could just burst up into the city. There could be a million or more of them already through. Even if she managed to close the portal, there were so many Fae in London that the world as humans knew it was already over. It would be a new dark age, with people and demons alike fleeing from the hunters. “Mankind will learn fear again. They will remember what it means to be prey. The natural order of things shall be restored.”
Sully hissed, “Shut the fuck up.”
They reached the next shaft after a few staggering steps and Sully cast a quick concussion to dislodge the elevator and send it screeching down into the depths.
“You have already lost. Better to submit now. Better to give in and hope for mercy.”
“Get out of my head. It’s already crowded enough in here.” Sully flew down in the wake of the elevator, letting the sparks of its fracturing brakes light their way.
Mol Kalath bellowed from behind her. “THEY KNOW NO MERCY, IONA. DO NOT BELIEVE THEIR—”
“How stupid do you think I am? Of course they’re lying,” she scoffed.
“But still there is the temptation to submit. It is rooted in all of you. You spend all your lives in fear of the coming storm, but when the thunder rolls you fall to your knees in supplication. Perhaps this time the lightning will not strike. Perhaps this time your doom will pass you by. Submit to me. Submit and chance may be on your side.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, god. It is the whitest version of Pratt. Who knew you could so love the sound of your own voice when you don’t even have a mouth?”
They landed on top of the elevator and with a flash of blue fire, Sully stripped the metalwork away.
“This is your final opportunity. Submit.”
Sul
ly stepped out into the hallway and smiled. “Go fuck yourself.”
A single Faerie stood at the end of the corridor. Its arms were held wide, its gristly fingers flexing. Sully’s stomach turned over at the sight of it, but she kept going. Mol Kalath was shuddering behind her, its fear vibrating through the floor to reach her. She’d been afraid of these things for a few days. The demons had been scared of them since the dawn of time. That was a dread with some momentum behind it. The pale thing took a step forward and it was all Sully could do to keep moving.
The fluorescent bulbs above them flickered and the pale monster darted forward. Sully launched an orb of flames the size of a watermelon down the corridor toward it, searing the varnish off the floor in a long sticky line. The Faerie darted around it with casual indifference, but proximity detonated the spell and the resulting explosion wasn’t so easy to dodge.
The Faerie might still have been alive in the cloud of acrid smoke up ahead, but Sully doubted it. She smiled back at Mol Kalath and then froze. Three Faeries were holding on to the demon. Sinking their fingers into the oily black feathers and siphoning the magic away. Sucking the life out of the demon. “Submit.”
Sully let the spellfire die in her hand. “Stop.”
“Submit to me and your pet can live. We have no specimens of different species ready paired. You are a curiosity.”
“So you’ve never seen what we can do?”
“You are the first paired specimens that I have—”
Mol Kalath barked out, “SULLY. NO.”
She closed her eyes.
Mol Kalath was there in her mind, its reserves of power a glowing presence so palpable she could reach out and touch it. There was no question that she could draw on its power, just as readily as it could draw on hers. They’d never tried it over a distance of more than a few inches, but Sully was willing to bet she could suck that well of power dry from where she was standing if she wanted to. That wasn’t the plan. She let her senses roll out over the demon, felt the places where the alien, encroaching presence of the Faeries were intruding into the still waters of the demon’s power. She was connected to Mol Kalath the way that the demons had joined together to support her out by the stone circle. The Faerie hissed into her mind. “What are you doing?”
It took no effort to feel her way out from the points where they were connected to where their reserves of magic lay. Mol Kalath groaned as they tightened their grip on it. “SULLY. YOU MUST ESCAPE.”
Sully just smiled. “We don’t run.”
She drew on the Faeries’ power through Mol Kalath, yanking it out through the demon so hard and so fast that none of them had a chance to respond. The demon’s reserves filled to bursting in a moment, then the overflow made the leap across the room to Sully, an invisible torrent of power that knocked her off her feet. Her own depleted reserves filled up. Spellfire overflowed out of her hand. Gushed out of the stump of her arm. Boiled out of her eyes in towering columns of light. Still there was more, an impossible amount of power.
Sully threw up her hand and forced it out. A tidal wave of raw red spellfire swept along the corridor, careening off of the walls. Everything that Sully had dumped right out of her as even more poured in from the other side. She had forgotten why she had started this, forgotten everything except the sweet burning of the power coursing through her. She was nothing but a living conduit.
She didn’t notice when the Fae collapsed in on themselves and crumbled apart. She barely even noticed that Mol Kalath was withering too until it crawled across the space between them and dropped itself bodily on top of her, startling her back to awareness. The corridor up ahead was covered in a kaleidoscope of colored ash. The corridor behind them was filled with the dusty remains of the Fae that had stood in their way. She gasped for air as Mol Kalath funneled magic back into the both of them.
Eventually they were steady enough to rise back up onto their feet. The demon croaked, “NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.”
Sully sank her singed, shaking fingers into its feathers. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
They walked along the rest of the corridor leaning against each other and crunching through the crystallized magic on the floor as they went. Sparks trailed behind them, drifting up from each step they took. Shimmers of spellfire still trickled out of Sully’s hand, crackling in the charged air. She paid it no mind. This close to the boundless resources of the portal, she could afford to lose it.
The Fae had done some remodeling of the closet where the Archive portal had been stored. It was at the center of a perfect sphere now, carved out of the surrounding rooms. Pale immobile figures hung in the air. The Fae lined the walls on each level, hundreds upon hundreds of them staring down. Mol Kalath bristled with terror.
When Sully opened her mouth to cast, one of the Fae sprang into place beside her and jammed fingers inside to catch hold of her tongue. Sully gagged. Another one appeared and caught a hold of her wrist. More of their grasping hands latched onto her. Encircling her legs. Locking onto her hips. Everywhere that she looked she was surrounded by pallid flesh and she couldn’t even scream through the fingers inside her.
Mol Kalath was wailing with anguish behind her as it got the same treatment. The demon lumbered forward, dragging the Fae along behind it for a few steps. Sully bit down hard and the fingers in her mouth came off with no more resistance than raw dough.
She spat them out and screamed out her traveling spell, burning the patterns of the spell into her own mind with no way to get them out. The demon lunged forward one final step, feathers tearing loose in the Faeries’ implacable grasp, and made contact.
With a gasp of agony, Sully released her spell and she and her demon were torn out of the rubbery, grasping hands. Everything went white as the magic overwrote even the channels of her senses. There was a distant sensation of falling, then her eyes started to work again. Mol Kalath was flung bodily into the side of a hut in an unfamiliar swamp and fell limp to the ground. She caught only a glimpse of it before the grotesque hands latched onto her once more and dragged her back along the course of her spell to land in a heap.
She dragged in half a ragged breath, then the pain hit her. The human body wasn’t meant to travel that way, not at the best of times, and certainly not dragged backward through a collapsing spell. She spat out a mouthful of blood and ignored the tickling as more ran out of her ears and her nose. She wasn’t meant to be here. She could remember that. The rest of her memories hurt to touch, so she left them alone for now, smoldering beneath the tracks that the traveling spell had cut into her brain.
“Will you submit?”
She barely knew what the words meant, but deep down in her gut, she knew what the right answer was. “No.”
She got herself up onto her knees and the nearest of the Fae started to edge forward. She held up her hands. Her name was Sully. They were monsters. Sully killed monsters.
“It will be easier for you if you submit. We will treat you with kindness. We will take your pain away.”
“No.” She spat out more blood.
The memory of Marie came back to her, and with it a rush of other names and places. Kisses and fights. Screams and cold skin. Another fragment of who she was. More pain.
“Shall we hurt this one? Will his screaming convince you?”
Her eyes focused on the man dangling by the scruff of his neck in the monster’s grasp. His eyes were bulging with terror. The hat. The bandana. Ogden. Screams. Fear. Knives. More pain.
Sully pushed herself up onto her knees. Her life was slowly returning to her, memory by memory. “Kill him if you want. I was going to do it if you didn’t.”
“Such disregard. Why was this one to die?”
As she said the words, she remembered. “He killed people. Hundreds of people. He’s a murderer and Pratt was going to let him walk away, just because he’s useful.”
Ogden was trying to struggle
but with the Fae’s fingers lodged in his spine he couldn’t do much more than groan. Sully’s memories came back to her like a sledgehammer blow. She fell forward and retched up another mouthful of blood.
Kneeling in the center of the circle of Fae, blood pouring out of her and damage she couldn’t even comprehend riddling her aching body, Sully came to a realization. “You . . . You’re still scared of me.”
“Fear is an emotion. Emotion is a trait of lesser species.”
“Then why are we still talking? Why were you begging me to give up all the way down here?” Sully gave them a red toothed grin. “You know that if I go down, I’m going down swinging. You know that I’ll take some of you with me. You might not be scared like a real person, but you don’t want to be the one that catches it, do you?”
Even as ruined as Sully was, she could still call spellfire to her hand without effort. The glow of the portal had illuminated the room with a sterile white light, outlining the Fae with stark shadows, but now those shadows began to dance. They tremored and shook in Sully’s presence, even though the monsters themselves were still. “Will you submit?”
This close to the portal, Sully’s reserves refilled faster than she could burn the power off. The flames in her hand licked higher. “I’ve got a wish. Just a little one. Not like anything Blackwood and his fools would have asked you for. If you grant it, I’ll submit.”
“What is your desire?” the Faerie whispered.
“There’s a girl. A vampire. Marie. I wish that she has a happy life from now on. Can you do that? Can you make it so she’s happy more than she’s sad?”
“Granted.”
Sully had seen how the demons granted wishes, but that was nothing like the terrible beauty of the Fae’s magic. They did not spill out spellfire, they traced perfect white lines of blinding cosmic power to rewrite the laws of probability. The image of that spellform would have haunted Sully for the rest of her life, if she had expected to live longer than the next few minutes. A wave of darkness rushed out from the center of the room when the spell was complete, a void like the absence of all existence. It swept out and washed over everything, leaving nothing in sight changed. The moment that the darkness had passed she nodded and snuffed out her own fire without a second thought.