The Crimson Hunters
Page 11
Not here; not this close to the town.
She grabbed her stomach and cried as she felt darkness engulf her as unconsciousness claimed her, and with it her life.
Darkness.
A little less darkness.
She opened her eyes to the settled night. The demons were still around her, but they felt their master’s coming. They tried to retreat from the light, and buoyed by this she struggled to her unsteady feet, but her stomach caused her to cry out in fresh agony.
Childbirth?
Demonbirth?
Unsteadily she stumbled through the darkness and tripped over the dead body of Lorgan, and she wailed aloud again. His eyes were open, grimaced in pain, but beneath the dim, deathly stare, she saw the glimmer of triumph, for his shield still dripped warm blood.
She stumbled farther, lost beneath the haze of darkness and came upon a beast feeding on Natteo. Stretched out in the grass, he’d embedded the last of his bolts in each shoulder of his massive killer. His daggers in its stomach. It wasn’t fair. Each should have been a killing blow, but steel and grit couldn’t slay some monsters.
Some take fire and fire alone.
“Where are you, master?” she whimpered as the tears fell from her eyes. She called out to the weaver who had saved her. Delivered her from the source. The great weaver lost for decades within the source. Lost from her mind.
No, not fully lost.
She thought of the book, and the stones, and the girl, and through the pain, she tried to put them all together into one coherent thought.
What does it mean?
She felt the tattoo upon her stomach and it burned again anew. The demon would be along. No, not demon.
Fiore, the demoness of the source, vile and cruel and waiting.
“I chose my guardians well,” she whispered, and the tattoo tore at her again. She could feel the beast close now, cracking the door between worlds. She tried to hold on, but the pain grew too much. She stumbled through the darkness
“Leave me!” she roared, and the demonic beasts understood as though she was their master, and she was, for they answered to the one surging through her. Speaking across the darkness.
They fled from Seren, but only towards the town. Within a breath, the town started crumbling under their assault as they attacked in a frenzy from all sides. She heard a moan from her mouth and it was not her own. Fiore was trying to get through, and she was the light to guide her way.
She stumbled through the battlefield and willed the source to obey her wish, and as the last pulsing throb of pain took her, she knew the hour was here. The last trapped grand demon was to walk.
She gripped the symbol and hated it. The mark was only the guiding light. She knew this because her master had whispered it in his teachings, and she had been a good student. A good student.
“A good student,” she moaned, and the night was alive with the screaming of the dying and she didn’t care, for she remembered his last few words, and she clawed at the tattooed symbol and hated it with everything she had. It was the symbol that enchanted the glade and returned her body to birth. It was the symbol which would bring Fiore back through once it broke.
But not through my broken body.
“To the fires with you, demoness!” Seren wailed, and she felt flame erupt around her fingers. She tore at the tattoo on her skin as though it was an embedded rock in the ground. Her hands became fire in themselves; beautiful magenta burned and bubbled her fingers and charred her arms, her face, her breath. She felt her clothing burn to nothing, and she realised she would be in death as she was born, and this consoled her.
She felt the tattoo harden as stone. No, not as stone, but as gold, for that is how they scribed all demon marks.
With burning fingers, she pulled that five-pronged spitting piece from her body like a leech upon a sickened old wretch. She tore it free and burned herself away to death, and the demon mocked her fiercely for the pain.
There was no stopping Fiore walking the world; a legend of a different era might conceive a way to tear a fierce fighter free from imprisonment at the same time. She held the piece above her head and knew it had one gift left to give beyond delivering life.
“Please,” she begged the dead gods of the source, and she glanced to her fallen comrades, even Derian.
“A last gift,” she cried, and she snapped the mark in two and succumbed to the fire completely. As her eyes burned and melted, she felt a greater pulse emerge from the shattered gold, and it tore her body to pieces. The pain was horrific until everything went eternally black.
The young mercenary opened his eyes and felt his head and was happy to discover everything was exactly where it should be, though he couldn’t recall exactly why. He sat in the grass and realised dawn had struck, and he was very much alive—though he had gained a strange phobia for wagon wheels. He tried to remember what had happened.
He stood up and fought a dizzy spell and discovered a beautiful girl sitting naked in the grass beside him. Well, mostly naked, as there were shards of burned clothing stuck to her porcelain perfect skin here and there, and he tried not to leer, but she was naked and she held a flower in her hand, as though it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen. She placed the flower back in the ground near its kin, and when she let go it stood upright as though never plucked.
Only the foul language of Natteo pulled him from his gaze. His best friend was staring in disgust at Lorgan who busied himself hacking a fallen demon to pieces. Derian tried to walk, but he stumbled in the sunshine, and only the reassuring grip of Kesta caught him as she appeared from behind.
“It seems lightning struck us with a great fortune, a second time,” she said, and she held Derian in a motherly embrace a moment longer than needed. Beside them, Seren stretched and sighed wonderfully, and Kesta bade him look away. Instead, he removed his cloak and held it to her.
Many demons lay strewn in the surrounding grass. Dead or having a wonderfully deep sleep in the glimmering daybreak. Their skins burned in the light regardless, and this was as beautiful as a naked girl with a flower.
He looked to the town’s wall to see many of the defenders rousing themselves as though they fell asleep mid-battle, and he thought all of this peculiar. So did they, judging by their expressions.
“Can’t birth again,” Seren whispered, and somehow she took his cloak distastefully before wrapping it around her body. “Broken now.” She flung the piece of gold far into the healthiest-looking grass he’d ever seen.
“What happened?” Derian demanded.
“Nothing. Stop Fiore birth,” she said. “When she comes, we die,” she added, as though it was nothing, as though any of this made sense.
“Who is Fiore? When will she come?” Seren spun around and eyed him coldly. He didn’t like that look. He didn’t like it at all.
“Today? Next day? A century? Don’t know. But she come, tear Seren’s soul apart,” she said, as though a grand demoness intending to kill her was no small thing at all.
“I pledge myself to protect you, Seren,” Derian proclaimed, and he offered his warmest smile. The smile that could launch a thousand apologies and have each one gladly accepted. He placed a grubby blood-covered hand upon her shoulder and squeezed it gently. It was not of lust nor desire, but he was merely reassuring the girl that all would be well.
“You are one of us, Seren,” he whispered and wondered, was it too much or just enough?
Just right.
She sighed in deep thought, and he sighed in agreement. They were in this together. Friendship first, perhaps in time, a little more. Her voice was strong and delightful to the ear. She looked into his eyes right down into his soul. His heart skipped a beat. “I hate you,” she said and walked away tightening her new cloak.
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The Crimson Hunters: The Crimson Collection vol I
The Crimson Hunted: The Crimson Collection vol II
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