Cyn dismissed the paintings. They had other concerns.
Backlit by the evening glow, in the room-width window, Rutger and Vargr were checking their guns, with switches clicking, magazines snapping, and metal glinting in moon’s rays. Out there was a wide balcony with a telescope still pointed up. Maybe the owners of this place had marveled at the Ghoul Lords sailing down through the sky?
She checked her own gun, Willow—the golden pistol—then the semi-auto rifle slung across her back. After a moment of sadness, she unholstered the pistol again, and kissed it. Was it terrible to remember Willow by killing the ones who took her?
She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to answer that, but the very fact that Death was still an aberration to her even as she grew high and fierce on demon nanites, even as her fingers ached to burn, it told her that perhaps she could control this power.
Approaching her guys and beckoning Vincent closer, she said softly, “Ready to go?”
They opened their arms as did she, and they came into the embrace, guns swinging aside, wings and horns flitting across the moon-blue backdrop. The stony solidity of Vincent anchored them as one force.
“We can do this. Thank you.”
She wasn’t sure why she was thanking them.
For being willing to risk themselves so that others might live. Yes.
Either way, she drew strength from the hug before she took that last breath she needed. She knew what came next, had been planning it on the way up the roadway, turn by turn, story by story.
Cyn was prepared to leap out through the window, once she’d smashed it—an act she’d practiced on other glass. Then she would lift herself and do the twisting turn on her burning wings, and she would rise first.
Send the first bolts and bullets winging.
If there were any blows coming, she would encounter them first, because she could heal them. What percent of her blood and body was demon? Ten, fifty, eighty? How did you measure it, by the gram or by some other weirdly mythical scale?
Either way she planned to fuck things up.
She took a step away from the huddle and launched herself running, one burning hand out before her, the glass melting and scintillating away in a splash of a thousand molten pieces. No doubt she’d embedded the fragments in every faraway wall. The window gone, obliterated, she leaped and hit the internal switch for her wings that she’d so recently discovered…
Airborne, she felt a jerk at her neck and waist and was screaming as something hauled her back inside, sliding her across the floor.
The guys gathered about her.
Peering at her from above, Vargr smiled, then reached around and unclipped something from her neck.
Cursing him she reached back and undid the leash at her belt. “You bastards,” she added.
“You’re not going without us.” His finger wagged.
Cyn flipped onto her feet and trod back to the windowless gap. “Come then, all of you. Join me.”
They lined up beside her.
“Go,” Rutger said, plainly, with little inflection.
They launched.
She flew and twisted in mid-air to grab the façade and claw her way higher, peeking above the edge of the Top. Simultaneously, Vargr flapped his vast wings beside her, his feet crunching onto the low parapet, balancing there as she hauled herself fully upright, to stand and stare across the land that had been made above.
Rutger pulled himself over to plant his boots to her right, then Vincent crawled up last of all.
This was not the time for a casual study of what was here, of getting out rulers and measures.
Instead all four of them drew their cellphones from their pockets and belts, and held them up to take videos before the denizens up here, the ghoul guards and the Ghoul Lords, the stinkers and whatever else inhabited this zone, became aware of their presence.
Not that smashing the window wouldn’t have made a noise.
People and creatures were within ball-throwing distance, guards with guns too, and she panned the phone across the scene, knowing these were the last few seconds she would have to take such a recording.
The others panned as she did.
There was soil in the distance, feet high, and crops growing, a few humans tending them, though many of the plants looked dead. There were mountains of rotting bones and a stench of decay that seemed to cling to the insides of her nostrils as she inhaled.
A Ghoul Lord swung about, teeth gnashing and shining in the moon’s macabre light, tentacles aloft and writhing, and below, below bulged like she did not recall before.
Pinkish balls bobbed slowly within and she stared harder unsure if those were brains, then very, very sure. At some stage in her previously innocent life she’d seen a naked human brain, and these pink bobbing spheres were brains.
More Ghoul Lords had seen them and were sailing in this direction. The Lure was strengthening, the tendrils of it clogging the air.
In the final moments before the shit hit the fan, she turned the cellphone on herself and waved and squealed, “selfie! hi!” then she tucked the phone into a jacket pocket, leaving it running—because who had time to press stop when aliens were fucking coming?
Guards too. Gun barrels were rising.
Triggers being pulled.
Bolts were zapping.
* * * * *
Bullets were flying past overhead, and a few kicked up dirt near his tentacles. Ugh. He retracted them. Humans had arrived at the Top and Avidex knew of this via the mental connection that ran through all Ghoul Lords.
Come.
Resist and kill them.
The need to join his fellow Ghoul Lords was strong and instinctive. He hummed. Instincts were hard programmed into creatures, and he knew of this fact from the humans he’d consumed, and the brains he’d once kept in his body jelly.
Do not go.
I am thinking, he answered.
Now he had only this one brain, this Willow, while many of the others had adopted many brains. Bucking the trend again. And it was all due to this one, his smart one. He smiled with his lovely teeth, swirled his tentacles and slowly headed in the opposite direction.
We will wait this out.
Good, Willow said.
Because I see there are more than enough of my Ghoul Lord colleagues opposing the invaders.
Yes, you would only get us killed.
Amusing how you think of yourself as us now, Willow. And yes, I agree, it might get us killed. Also your previous idea that nine brains made us a slow, large, and vulnerable target was spot on.
A multi-brained Ghoul lord exploded in the distance and fleshy bits went this way and that.
She’d informed him the probability of a human attack was high. He wondered what his fellows would think of her prediction if they were killed? Well, logically they’d be dead and not thinking.
It was also amusing how conversing with the human he’d eaten… was it five times now… fascinated him.
Logic.
Beauty. He had to admit the shape of the things in the environment had become more intriguing. The moon above was nicely circular at times, whereas at other times the crescent shape was better. Why was this so?
Then there was the what is death question. Or life? Or good or bad? Can one be both?
So many things to muse upon.
He knew she thought to corrupt him with her logic, but he was onto her.
* * * * *
“We need to go!” Vargr yelled.
This was hell on Earth except at the Top, just as Cyn had thought it would be. They had the evidence and had shown they could resist the Lure, but an army gathered. Time to kill a few, clear the way, and leave.
“Yes! Time to go!”
Rutger and Vincent agreed.
She had her semi-auto unslung and blasting, while the others unleashed their own brand of violence. Bullets and bolts flew in a torrent, a hail of metal that knocked a few down—a Ghoul Lord as well as ten or twenty of the guards facing them
, but more Ghoul Lords sailed in. The Lure soared, thickened, and tainted thoughts.
She batted it away, wrenched the Lure from the air around the others.
As the four stepped back, boots and feet feeling for the edge, their fire tore into the oncoming guards and their alien masters.
Rutger teetered first at the parapet, even as Vargr swung a foot out. He wasn’t unfurling his wings but the zing of bullets past them said wings would make too big a target.
And she waited…waited, wanting to be sure the others were safe before she dropped from the story’s edge.
But Vargr side-eyed her, clearly knowing her thoughts.
“Fuck!” She kicked him, and he only went to one knee and bared his teeth in a grin.
“You. Go!” he shouted.
“No! You!”
Fuck him, them. Even Rutger watched her. This was insane.
The Lure threads soared above in a tsunami of unseen but dire attraction. It pulled at the mind. It came seething in, blackly, swamping. She cursed and shook the threads from her, and they surged away then returned, a flood that never gave up, not once it had you by the neurones.
The others?
She saw the Lure shake them, shake their thoughts, then felt it again seize her. Hundreds of the Ghoul Lords were here, massing, or she thought it might be hundreds, for her eyes were failing, blurring.
Her rifle fell from her grasp.
Such a target, screeched her fired-up gritty, demon self. Shoot!
She yanked out Willow and with shaking hands poured bolts into the biggest of those GLs, watched the bags of brains explode in hues of pink, cream, and red, and she cackled as she felt the sigh of their deaths. One by one, their minds winked out, expired, carked it. Gone to nothingness.
Such fun!
But her companions… Rutger, Vargr, and the stony one whose name she could not… quite recall.
She blanked. She let her gun hand swing low, dangling, her fingers barely keeping in touch with that precious metal thing.
Do not drop it.
She raised Willow again, sighting at the blurs. Someone grabbed her by the waist and pushed her into the abyss, and she fell, wind whistling past, mouth open, screaming. She shoved Willow into her holster. Vincent had flung her from the Top, just as he’d said he might, if the worst happened.
It hadn’t quite been the worst, but close.
Her lovers, where?
At her thought, her flamelike wings burst into being, slowing her descent, sputtering flame, and she gained altitude. The fall had been short, and she was now five stories down, but where were they?
The loss of either of them… Unbearable. It nearly brought her to tears in the midst of chaos.
The loss, oh the loss.
Desperate, she scanned, and a moment later, thankfully, thank all the fricking, fumbling, useless gods, she saw Rutger pull himself back into War Quarter and onto a balcony that had cover from fire. He looked unwounded, and she swung her gaze higher, still frantic.
Her heartbeat was ratcheting madly, stuttering.
Yes!
Other wings tore the air, swung nearer.
“I’m here!”
Vargr!
He’d perhaps been rescued by Vincent too, for he was alive and flying beside her.
“Where’s Vincent?”
“There!” He pointed.
At the parapet, their savior, the Lure-immune Vincent, was prepared to drop, pieces crumbling from his feet, and it looked, really, as if everything would be okay.
She found her lost rifle on the strap at her back, brought it around and high, ready for any guards who might appear.
From some place at the Top, from a hiding place she could not see, a horde of stinkers hurled themselves at Vincent, pouring left to right across the air, thudding into him from knee to neck, stabbing him.
Their momentum dislodged Vincent, thrusting him into space.
Pieces of him sprayed outward and fell past her.
She began to shoot; the bolts from her rifle sizzled upward.
Precision shots, and each of hers and of Vargr’s shots, and now of Rutger’s, blew away a stinker.
But there were so many. They covered him.
Blood gouted, droplets spattering the sky and her face as the horrid creatures kept stabbing at her friend, as he fell, twisting. He plucked the stinkers away, but the damage done had to be severe.
A plummeting stinker dropped onto her upturned face and ripped at her. She felt the slashes lengthen, caught in sharpness. Jarred from her grasp, her rifle fell into the depths between the scrapers. Burning pain shattered her breath even as she grabbed the wretched, wriggling, muscular thing and flung it sideways. Then she blew it to pieces with Willow, drawn hurriedly from the holster.
Cyn blasted it again as it tumbled, twice more, and looked up blinking through the wretched hurt and blood, just in time to see Vargr catch Vincent, and fly him, dangling precariously from his grip, to where Rutger waited.
If anyone had deserved injury it was she. This had been her plan.
She spat away some blood.
Blurry of vision, wings beating, she killed six more stinkers when they waved claws at her from above at the edge, before she left the field of battle. When she looked over her shoulder, her wings muddled the air between her and them.
Skipping feet across air and concrete, she landed on the balcony and shut down her wings of fire with embers flicking away as she did so. She went to her friends.
Her wounded friends. Gods.
The trail of blood leading to Vincent was vast and sticky and red. If he died, she’d… she didn’t know but someone else would die, badly. Teeth gritted, she walked into the colored darkness that hadn’t really been dark ever since she became a demon beaster.
If she’d somehow killed Vincent…
If…
Please no.
She kneeled beside where he lay, with Rutger and Vargr pressing on his wounds with their hands. His arm looked to be nearly torn away. The bloody stinkers had done it again. How she hated those fuckers. When she heard a noise and found one of them scuttling across the floor at her, tap-scuttling on its sharp triangular legs, she shot it enough times to tear it into a few hundred bits, to make it mostly a smudge.
Then she followed her retreating mates and friend. When they halted again, she helped to tie a tourniquet around Vincent’s stump. It accomplished little.
Trolls bled red. Who knew?
They rose and kept going.
Drummer met them below as they staggered out of the roadway onto the main War Quarter level. They’d half flown, half walked the distance. Her wings weren’t a lot of use she’d discovered, when it came to bearing another’s weight. Plus Rutger and V had been horrified at her own facial wounds.
So what. Blood replenished. She’d get more of that red stuff, heal the cuts, no matter if her nose and jaw was slashed, one eye almost blinded and gouged.
She’d heal.
She’d convinced them of that though both had pinned her down for a second and bandaged her head.
“Yes, sirs,” she’d mocked them, while staring past them at Vincent. Only to knock their hands aside and fucking insist Vincent had priority.
She’d heal, and even if she didn’t… maybe she deserved this.
Yeah, she did.
“I see you failed.”
Drummer. She curled her lip. “We did not, you fucker. We were overwhelmed by large numbers of Ghoul Lords, stinkers, and guards, but we proved we can do this. The Lure is resistible.”
“You think?” His sneer took in her face and Vincent, where V and Rutger held him between them. “Go get fixed. I think we’re done with this rubbish.”
“What do we need to convince you to commit the Warriors?” She glared.
“Nothing. You never will.”
“What. You coward, fucking useless coward.”
At that he laughed, arching back, roaring. He may not have seen, but his men were appalled, including O
rin.
Blood still dripping from her chin, feeling half flayed, she twitched her mouth. “Fucker. Someone else needs to be the leader of War Quarter.”
“You? Pipsqueak. You’re ready to fall over. Go get healed.”
“Asshole coward.”
She saw the flare of hatred there in his eyes. Finally. “So much mouth on you. Duel me then. Nothing but our hands. To the death. Then, hey, you can be leader. Except you’ll be dead.”
“Later.” Then she turned briskly and went to help Vincent get to someone who could aid him.
“Run away, girl!”
Ignoring the fool was simple. She’d deal with him later.
Vargr looked ready to spank her, if he wasn’t occupied holding Vincent. The troll would be heavy.
At that, Vincent spoke for the first time since he was hurt, his head swinging up, “The sun. I feel in my bones. I’ll heal if you let me see the sun.”
“Hmph.” Rutger was skeptical from that tone. “You’re certain?”
“Of course not. It’s new to me too. The sun. Please.” His voice dwindled. “And maybe something to plug the wound until then. Putty?”
She smiled weakly with tears teasing her eyes. That was a joke. He made jokes, and he was perhaps dying.
She trailed after them. It would be hours until dawn. She would wait with him and with her mates. None of them would leave him alone.
The sun took far too long to return. It flooded the balcony where they’d sat him against a wall. His blood still leaked but it had slowed. Tourniquets did almost nothing. Needles couldn’t get to his veins. Was it hopeless or was he right?
They could only leave him be, to become stone, and they would hope.
Vargr squeezed her shoulder.
“I’m okay,” she whispered, staring out through the window. When Rutger and V retreated to escape the light, she stayed a while longer and watched her friend as his skin hardened and his eyes froze into rock.
It would be hours before they’d know if this succeeded.
In the meantime.
She ran out, sprouted her wings, and spiraled down a few levels. Her mates could not follow her into the sun.
Cyn Page 13
