I lay there on the ground for three shuddering breaths, before I could sit up. I looked around in horror at the crater we sat in, where one of the biggest cities in the world used to be. The ocean started roaring into the ragged, bowl-shaped depression as we attempted to drag ourselves to our feet.
Ella-Marie was yanking me up, her eyes on the wall of water roaring down toward us. “Parker, time to go!”
But then we were on the rim of the crater on the far side of a three-mile wide crater that was at least a half-mile deep. Dorothy was there on one knee, panting, her clothing singed and smoking, looking shocked as she mumbled, “That bitch can hit.”
Then she looked around, and froze as she asked in a tiny voice, “Toto?” We turned and my heart caught in my throat at the bloody mass of limbs and fur. Toto was gasping as her massive canine chest heaved, trying to take in air.
She shifted to human as her eyes rolled back, and Toni... Antionette looked to be a scared child as her eyes tried to focus on the witch beside us. “Dot?” Then her breathing stopped and Dorothy of Oz, the Witch of the Four Cardinal Points dropped to her knees and scooped her love into her arms and sobbed.
Through my tears and the pain of the vice on my heart which was immobilizing me, I felt something. Something so black and evil building that it was smothering me, I knew what it was, and it terrified me as much as the Elders, it was... wicked.
I grabbed Ella-Marie's hand and dragged her away as fast as we could go. The rim of the crater exploded into a torrent of chaotic crackling green power, like a shaft of coherent green lightning, fifty yards wide, which sought to punish heaven itself as it lit the sky as it shot past the clouds. We dove at the last instant and barely avoided being vaporized like everything inside the pillar of energy, including the body of our friend and Dorothy's one true love. The only thing keeping the wicked inside of her from running rampant. But now she was gone...
Our witch spun and screamed, emerald lightning actually trailing from her eyes, cutting through the fabric of space around her as she dove at the Elder who was diving back at her from above somehow. The tone of her scream came from something evil, something that made even the most alpha of predators turn and run as Antionette's name seemed to be burned into all of creation.
The next moment the Elder was screaming for a different reason as the two clashed, their magics tangling, and the rage behind Dorothy's slicing through Mnemosyne's like it wasn't even there, sending the would-be god tumbling through the devastation that had once been a great city, her shoulder set aflame with that green crackling flame.
Dorothy just hovered the two hundred yards over to the staggered Elder, the ground beneath her cracking open as the earth and stone beneath her actually started burning under the sheer power spiraling around her in a chaotic green storm.
I just stared helplessly as they collided, again and again, Dot slinging such powerful spells and lightning that it felt as if the world around her was dying as she sucked its essence dry. It was all the Elder could do to defend against it as she backed up, deflecting blow after blow of that sick, dark power.
I could see how the wicked could corrupt someone, and why the two wicked witches of Oz had been so feared. Here Dot had lost herself, and the look on her face was half rage over the loss of her love, and half a euphoric glee of unleashing this soul corrupting magic storm. Had we lost Dot completely?
Shuddering at the thought, I imagined that Dorothy could be just as big a threat as an Elder, judging by what I was witnessing, with an Elder on the ropes like this.
I looked to Ella-Marie and she shook her head at me. “This is beyond us, Parker. This is god-level shite. I hadn't wanted to believe us to be so inconsequential... but...” She looked at the scale of devastation, eyes red from the tears she had shed for Antoinette. I've never seen my love look so... helpless.
Then I realized that I was wrong. No matter how powerful any being is, even a god, there are limits. You can't sling around power like Dorothy was doing without some sort of cost. I could feel it with each subsequent attack, Dot was weakening. I called out, “Dorothy, you have to...” Then a gag was covering my mouth as she pushed on harder than before.
Her voice reverberated through the fabric of space itself as she told Mnemosyne, “You took from me the one thing that brought me joy, that brought me peace. And in your ignorance, you've set me free.”
She thrust her hands up and yanked down, I fell to my knees as I struggled to remove the gag like I was pulled down with the thousands of green bolts of crackling lightning that left furrows in reality as they converged upon the Elder.
Dot's voice was heard over the cacophony of deafening thunder and the shrieking of the Elder, “That's it, scream for me, little god!”
Then it was over, Dorothy dropped to the ground, panting and sweating, borderline insanity and glee in her eyes as she looked at the Elder who staggered and fell backward onto the ground, her skin burned everywhere, her clothing and hair burned away.
We just looked on and I, for the first time, was terrified of our friend. That was what she was capable of without Toto to calm her...
But then the Elder moved. She sat up and struggled to get to her feet, swaying as she started to chuckle. Her chuckle was interrupted by a cough as she spat out black ichor. Then she said, “You used most of your power, Witch of Oz. I still hold more than you, so it is over. And after we reshape the mortal realm, we will head to Oz next. Your realm defied us, but now it will not have its defender, as you will be dead.”
We had watched our friend, our ally, give her best, and now it was the Elder's turn. Dot was only at a fraction of her power now as she was pushed back, blow after physical blow, impact after impact of barely deflected magic, and she was wavering.
The elder grabbed her with her only good, massive hand, and proceeded to slam Dorothy face-first into the ground, then she lifted her to look her in the eyes and said, “You were a formidable adversary, no one has hurt me the way you have, for that, I will remember your name, Witch.”
She started to crush my friend in her grasp, and I had never before felt so helpless, not even the time werewolves were bearing down upon me the day I met my Ella-Marie. I was going to watch yet another person I loved, die before my eyes.
That's when I felt it and realized Ella-Marie was no longer by my side. It felt as if the earth was being drawn up in massive amounts into one spot. I looked back to Mnemosyne, to see Ella-Marie standing under her, where she held Dot in her hand, dangling above the wreckage of the city.
Ella was pulling in more earth energy than I thought even possible, far beyond her usual limit as she took on a brilliant crystal sheen. I shouted out, “No!” Knowing she couldn't channel that much, it would...
Then the world shook as three things happened at once while I screamed in denial at hearing “We love you, Parker,” in my head, wishing what I witnessed not to be true. A huge spire of pure diamond crystal shot up from the ground, up through the damaged arm of the Elder, shredding it, as Ella-Marie, the loves of my life, shattered into a million pieces, and my heart died inside my chest as my girls gave their lives to save Dot's.
I blinked in that denial and disbelief as the Elder bellowed in a primal sort of pain, dropping Dorothy and grasping a bloody stump where its arm had been sheered off. I charged forward, the stone that had once been my heart filling me with a blinding rage I didn't know I was capable of.
I was slinging my arms wide as I reached the mortally wounded, vile being, who had taken my loves away from me. And a rain of huge crystal shards I had drawn through my body erupted from my splayed arms, and slammed into the bloody wound, causing my wounded enemy to howl in a keening pain.
Dot had struggled back to her feet and I could feel her reaching for her power, what little there was and she brought the lightning again, all centered on the savagely bleeding wound on the woman who would be a god. I kept slinging volley after volley of those oversize shards, Dot's spells combining
with them, causing them to super-heat and explode as they sank into the enemy.
The Elder's screaming abruptly stopped, then she tumbled back, the howling ceasing and she began to shrink. Dot stopped her assault and fell to her knees, beyond exhausted. And I could feel the power of the Elder shudder then fail. As she died, a swirling mass of sandy looking power drifted out toward Dot, and with a cruel look in her eyes, she reached out, and that dying power of the Elder was sucked into Dorothy Gale, to become part of her as the power of the witches she had killed was claimed by her long ago.
She arched her back in a spasm as her power was rekindled, then Dorothy of Oz stepped up to the corpse of the Elder, sneered and said through tears of green flame that burned through the stone and earth below her feet as they dripped, “This is for Antoinette.” Then she curled her fingers and green lightning engulfed Mnemosyne's body, tearing it to pieces, leaving a charred shadow where the Elder had lay.
Then Dorothy spun toward me, cruel malice in the green lightning barely contained in her eyes as she sneered, raising her hand, energy crackling. And I fell to my knees, sobbing over the hole where my heart should have been, I could feel the loss of Ella and Marie as a physical void in my heart and mind where the reassuring pressure of their presence, which always seemed to watch over me, had been. But now they were gone, and I couldn't stop sobbing. At least I would be with them again soon. We had lost Dorothy too, and she was going to send me to meet my loves in the next life.
But the wicked witch of Oz, who had taken over my friend, hesitated, and she looked over to the crystal shards littering the debris of a once-proud city, the shards of my heart... and she blinked.
“Parker?”
Then I was sobbing into her shoulder as the Witch of the Four Cardinal Points held me, and we cried together over the loss of our only loves.
Then she stood, I felt her renewed power starting to crackle, and almost flinched away when it engulfed me too. But it didn't burn, or slash at me like I thought it might, instead it seemed to cocoon me protectively as she said in a hoarse voice, “There are more of these bastards. We have to go.”
I could feel Masika's power questing for us, but before it could touch us, and bring us back, Dot did it herself. Her power was even stronger than I remembered, was it the power from Mnemosyne that she had taken as her own?
Whatever it was, she slashed at the air and my ears started bleeding when she tore a rent in reality and stepped us through to where I instinctively knew was Seattle, and straight into a world on fire.
Chapter 12 – London Has Fallen
Robyn corkscrewed through the air in front of me, firing her bow as she called out, “Mandywolf, they are flanking the last of the soldiers.” I nodded as I saw her arrow, blessed by Perchta herself, make an impossible shot as it sliced through a projectile that was heading toward me. Well impossible for anyone but Robyn of Locksley, making her just that much more desirable and sexy to me.
I watched the explosion of flame and shrapnel and looked down to see a tall crablike being as it discarded the tube of what looked like a primitive version of a shoulder-fired missile, moments before it and a dozen enemy around him were taken out by a cannonball from the Sea Devil which exploded with the unrestrained magics the Lost Boys had imbued it with.
A human-looking woman in a trailing cloak, had waved a hand and the magic was deflected from her, all those around her weren't so lucky. She wasn't the first magic-user in the swarm. This whole battle seemed wrong to me. Our adversaries were all conscripted unwillingly to fight for the Elders or their realms would suffer the same fate as ours. While some appeared to be willing and eager participants, happily trying to inflict pain and suffering, more than once I saw fear on the faces of those trying to kill us.
There was the one young catlike female who was just cowering in the wreckage. She didn't look old enough to be fighting a battle like this. When I landed near her the abject terror in her eyes gave me pause. My morality won out over my desire to destroy the Elders and all they brought with them. I had calmed the girl, then flew her up to the Sea Devil, and assured her the purser would take care of her. The Lost Boys were fascinated with her as her tail swished in her agitation and fear.
For a bit I was worried the supply of people and creatures that Phoebe had brought with her, him, whatever, was endless, but they had finally stopped flooding out of the portal and it closed. I glanced around from where I hovered after taking out a humanoid looking man with some sort of jet pack and some kind of lightning pike, with a well-placed round from a musket-ball to one of the tanks on his back. Hey, combustibles are combustibles. And whatever he was using to power the pack, had him blowing to bits over the field of combatants below in a spectacular burst of what looked to be plasma.
Parker and Raz would be giddy that while some combatants were almost mindless brutes, some had advanced weapons like this and even some space weapons. They'd kill for a ray gun. I paused and hoped they were ok. I hated that our group had to split up. It left us all weaker.
I snorted as a huge wall of flame ripped across from another magic user, and it was snuffed out as it hit a wall of force Wendy had brought up to protect the last few soldiers before she dove into the air to engage Phoebe directly again. Weak was not a descriptor one would use for my mom.
I exhaled shakily, a full quarter of London now laid in flaming ruin and rubble. The air squadrons had been batted from the sky by Phoebe with virtually no effort. And the more advanced races with her had silenced the heavy artillery and tanks early on.
There was a moment of panic when the suits who had come with us, had fired up some equipment that had me spasming and plummeting to the ground like a meteor, my entire being feeling as if it were on fire. Mom had barely caught me as she staggered on her feet. Even the Elder looked stunned for a moment. This was one of the weapons the covert government black ops assholes had fashioned to combat the Avatars if they felt we were any threat to them.
The asshats were disrupting magic around the device, which meant their best defenders were hobbled. The men didn't know what hit them when I fired half a clip of my dual Glocks into the device as Robyn's arrows struck it and the Elder, some of their magic users, and mom obliterated it with magic. The resulting blast killed a few of the people who were supposed to have been on our side. They brought a pea shooter to a boss fight and paid the price. Does it speak ill of me that I didn't have any compassion for their plight?
The Sea Devil climbed back up into the sky after it had lost most of its altitude from the attack.
I glanced back at the huge pirate ship that would dwarf Old Iron Sides as I hovered, cannons belching death from above, the pirate flag streaming in the wind. Half the sails were torn and tattered, small fires on the deck were being attended to and there were pockmarks of damage from the more powerful magic attacks from a couple of their combatants and Phoebe herself.
But she was still sea and sky worthy as the Lost Boys and the former Lost Boys who were her crew, continued to fire in defiance. Projectiles and energy beams and magic rippled in the air just inches from the ship as the massive shield of magic that allowed her to sail through the Nothing which even the Elders could not enter without being erased from existence without even a memory of their ever being.
Flights of planes flew overhead marked with flags from a dozen European and African countries and hundreds of parachutes opened over London. Soldiers and military equipment coming to join the fight for the survival of mankind.
The fighter escorts were able to fire one volley of missiles and tracer rounds into the enemy horde, wreaking havoc as they brought death and destruction, before Phoebe roared in frustration and with a swipe of his hand, seemed to tear open the sky and all the planes were swallowed. They would be stuck in that place between places, the paths we sail between the many realms out there.
The Elder had originally tried to do that to the Sea Devil, telling me that as omnipotent as they wanted everyone to think
they were, they didn’t know as much as they thought. You can't stuff a vessel that can sail the pathways, back behind the veil. When the Sea Devil simply sailed right back out into the sky from behind the veil, firing a full broadside at him which had him stagger back a half step, the Elder looked frustrated.
I watched as Phoebe swung a blade, of what looked like some sort of coherent magical energy, at mom. It struck her hook and the tone of her magic rang like a bell that rippled across the entire battlefield, I could feel my own reality ripple as it passed and the blade... shattered into fizzling energy.
Tinkerbell, Robyn, and I flew off to defend the reinforcements that were parachuting in. Helpless and defenseless as the enemy below started picking them off one at a time. I growled low and deep. Letting the rumble of it urge me on.
I slid up beside a French Paratrooper and spun and started unloading a clip at the enemy below who had projectile weapons firing at us. She was firing an automatic rifle into the thinning mass of fighters below, far less accurately, screaming out the challenge of a warrior, before her voice and gun were silenced.
I roared in anger as I looked over to see her hanging limply by the straps, blood covering her chest where her body armor did her no good.
Drawing my cutlass and dagger I swooped down low, my toes grazing the rubble-strewn ground as I spun through the enemy, mowing down as many as my blades could reach. Then... I collided with a wall. Well, not a wall, but a wall of muscle.
I looked up from the ground to a lizard-like being that reminded me of a gorilla. It smirked at me and cracked its knuckles and in English, or maybe it wasn't English since in my travels on the Sea Devil, the magic of the Lost Boys has somehow made it so we understood the people in all the realms we sailed through. Their version of a universal translator. “This is going to be fun, little girl.”
I was seeing stars as I was tumbling into the mass of fighters when he struck me with what felt like a sledgehammer instead of a fist. I shook my head and sprang to my feet, slashing my cutlass across a fanged doglike creature's chest while jamming my dagger up under the chin of some sort of magic-user in mid cast. They fell to my sides as I sheathed the weapons then pulled out my twin telescoping batons and flicked my wrists to extend them.
Armageddon Page 9
