Until Dawn

by brett hicks

  She narrowed her gaze on me and her nose twisted in disgust.

  “Necromancer…”

  She made it sound like a curse. To most inhumans, it was, I supposed. I strode forward and willed my leg to behave, I was not giving her any indication of weakness. She shrieked like a bloody banshee and launched herself at me and I collided with her, very much surprised as her blade managed to parry mine. I kicked out with my good leg and twisted my upper body to the side.

  The blow caught her in the lower gut and she grunted. I pulled back before she could cleave my leg off at the top of my thigh. She lashed out with a follow-up thrust and a forward-kick. I caught the kick in my injured leg and grunted in pain. Elisa sneered at me.

  “Even with that filthy power of yours, you’re not my match. I have survived four-times the life your precious princess has, and I will survive four times more!”

  I caught her slash and I kicked high and caught her in the chin, causing Elisa to back-peddle a few steps.

  “The first rule about fight club, is shut the fuck up and fight!”

  I rushed in and dodged her, and she kicked at me, but I moved at the last possible moment and I lashed out and caught her in the back searing her from shoulder, to shoulder. Elisa was fast, so she managed to evade the blow enough to keep it from becoming fatal.

  She turned and swung, I parried and kicked her in the chest, knocking the wind form her lungs. She rushed into me and we went to the ground in a tangle of body parts. She gripped my sword-hand and I gripped hers. We rolled about in the street like a human wheel. She snarled and growled like a feral dog.

  Her eyes were wild, and her expression was one of stark outrage. Like she could not conceive of why someone was daring to fight her to the death! I punched erratically with my left hand. I lacked the same power as my right, due to my wound. Elisa was in worse shape though; her shoulders and her upper back were smoking ruin. I had probably just narrowly missed paralyzing her.

  We wrestled and tumbled. I thought of how I had summoned my power and blew the head off the vampire in my apartment. This was the same principle. I released my hold on the power manifesting my blade, trusting myself, and my own weapon enough to know it would return to me when I called it.

  Elisa’s eyes widened in shock.

  “Impossible! No Alchemist lives! How can you possibly have conjured that sword?!”

  I was zoned out, focused on killing the bitch, not chatting with her. I pushed the power into my left hand as I jabbed her ribs again and I called the blade, I pushed and pulled at the same time as my punch connected and a second later, I smelled burning meat under me and a rattling death-scream.

  Elisa was dead, and the full weight of her domain came crashing down on me. I felt everything inside Manhattan island now. My senses only told me of supernaturals who were aligned to Elisa, or the ones aligned to myself.

  I coughed, my lungs were burning from the bile scent of charred fairy queen, but I ignited her corpse with my blade and kept feeding heat into her until she was nothing but ashes scattering to the wind.

  I sank back on my ass and heaved in a few deep breaths. Elisa was dead, and I was not in charge of every damn thing on the island of Manhattan!

  Thirty:

  Seri was clawing her way out of the thick mass of bodies. Her magic raged against everything around her and her telekinetic energy slammed into the zombies. A sword slashed down nearby her face and she caught the motion of Liam slashing out at limbs and hacking through a neck.

  Seri gathered her strength and she pushed with all her considerable might, unleashing a torrent of raw telekinetic power. Her energy smashed through the zombies still a top her and they flew twelve feet into the air.

  She dodged as Dean brought his blade down, cleaving for her head.

  That was new!

  “You have been keeping a secret little mouse. Elisa is dead, because your kin raised half her army in battle against her! She’s First Born, isn’t she?!”

  His voice took on a new manic edge, Seri’s heart jackhammered in her chest.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  She had tried everything she could to keep this discovery from him, but damn mortal inventions! She saw the cell phone in his left hand. He had someone watching the fight in Harlem!

  Wait, he said Elisa is dead! Shit, she did it, she killed her! No one else is strong enough to ward off her icy power!

  Seri felt a mixture of jealousy and pride in Thea. The girl had only been a part of this world for a few days and yet she had managed to conquer two territories! She was powerful beyond imagination, and she was clever as hell! Seri had to survive this, because Thea would now be a damn target!

  “You can’t expect a girl to reveal all her secrets to her creepy stalker, can you?”

  Seri snarked at him and he growled like a rabid animal. Seri dodged the brown-tinted necrotic blade. His motions were so fast, they nearly blurred to her vision. Seri managed to keep herself a step ahead, but the horde of his zombies were only gaining grown. She would share Elisa’s fate, unless she dared to hope for a miracle.

  Until dawn, that’s what I was told…

  Seri recalled the cryptic warning and timeline for her escape. She had not understood the meaning, and it still didn’t make much sense to her, but she jumped back and slammed her telekinetic energy into four zombies leaping for Liam with starved expressions on their grim and twisted features.

  “Come on, we’ve gotta run, now!”

  Liam and Bix didn’t bother to question their princess, she was the boss and they were faithful to their dying breaths.

  Seri blast a hole in the ranks to the right and Bix sent razor bushes up from the grown and vines reached out in multiple directions, snaring and slashing into zombies and remaining live fighters.

  Liam slashed and jabbed, hacking off limbs.

  “Liam, how do we get out of here?”

  Liam looked back to her and sighed.

  “The vision’s unclear now, because she has already set it into motion.”

  Seri raised a brow and glanced at her second, as they dashed madly towards their weapons cash she and Liam had buried earlier.

  “What” it” are we talking about?”

  Liam closed his eyes and sighed. She could tell he really didn’t want to have this conversation.

  “The Grand Junctions, Thea is the nexus of events that brings the Grand Junction to fruitions. All seers’ visions are not going black, we cannot peer into the Grand Junction, because the events are too chaotic, too muddled by the plethora of decisions that will have to be made.”

  Seri’s eyes widened at Liam’s admission.

  “Liam, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Liam have a single haggard laugh

  “Did you not see what condition I was kept in the last time someone knew what I was?!”

  Seri’s neck was icy with the remembrance of the beats and violations Liam had endured at the hands of the Baron. He never did explain his reasoning for keeping Liam in such a state, and even Cain seemed curious as to what Liam must have done to fall to such low esteem with the Baron.

  “He was keeping you in chains, beating and violating you, because you could see the future? Why? Why not offer you the riches of the world?”

  Liam snorted and shook his head.

  “He killed my mum to get at me, so I loathed him. He tried bribery, but soon learned that I was as stubborn as a pair of unnamed princesses I happen to know. So, he begun to beat the shite out of me for visions. I never gave him much, but there was one thing I told him and that bastard Dean…”

  Liam looked repentant and sorrowful in his expression.

  “I told him you were the hinge-pin to the Grand Junction. That you would be the one responsible for the greatest sweeping changes this world would ever encounter. That you were the very pivotal person behind everything, and that your existence was the very key to our future. Everything beyond that, became black. Like all other seers, I cannot peer into this time much, but I
have caught glimpses. In those glimpses, I saw Thea, but I never knew when or where she would immerge, I always knew who she was going to become Seri.”

  Seri’s mind swam with the implications. The Grand Junction!

  “How could you have kept all of this from me? You who knows me like no one else ever will. You who I have trusted with my every secret and all my problems. Liam, how could you?”

  Seri’s eyes burned with tears and she dodged a tree and kept running at full tilt.

  “I couldn’t talk of it Seri, because the future is ever moving. If I had explained all of this to you, then you never would have left Europe and you would have ended up in chains on a bed in Dean Sylvester’s French mansion. I have seen that possible future, but you made the cunning decision to twist your father’s rules against him! Seri, I could hit, and I could suggest certain things to help you find your path, but I am just a seer. I cannot steer your future too directly, lest I break the vision I am trying to realize!”

  “What happens at dawn? Tell me!”

  Liam huffed and shook his head.

  “If I tell you now, you will shatter the future. Seri, the Grand Junction is at hand, just run until dawn, please.”

  “Incoming!”

  Vampires raced after them, Bix was crouched, pulling two large bags from the ground. She tossed one to Liam. He retrieved a large assault rifle with a long silencer attached. Seri was ever the stickler for discretion, and this was one moment where he could totally agree that they did not need to light up the night with automatic weapon fire, at least the noise of it.

  Seri snatched to offered rifle and slammed the clip snug and pulled back on the bolt. She pointed with her right hand and opened a spray of cold iron bullets at her approaching enemies.

  The rifles made a muffled sound, and bloody holes began to pepper their encroaching attackers. Seri pointed and unloaded her clip into the left-center of her targets. Three vampires fell, and Liam was unloading on the ones opposite those, his aim was less accurate, but not by much. He caught one in the throat and then a burst in the chest, finally the vampire hit the ground. Vampires died from destruction of heart, or brain, no other way.

  Bix made a disgusted noise and unloaded a rifle on more approaching vampires.

  “This is just wrong!”

  She protested, and Seri flicked her gaze to Bix.

  “We’re trying to survive, not fuss over how noble their deaths were!”

  She sniffed and nodded at the same time. She understood, but she wasn’t happy about using the mortal weapons. Immortals were extremely hard to kill, and the older they became, the harder it was to kill them. Blades were the most effective manner of death. Nothing survives without its head attached. When killing a master vampire, you want to take the head and the heart, lest they rise again, lending some credence to the myths about the undeath inside them.

  “Princess, we should keep on moving, lest our pursuer catch up!”

  He means Dean and Seri locked her eyes on Liam.

  “Care to share anything with the rest of the class?!”

  Liam looked at her with a slightly widened eyed gaze. He shook his head slowly and mumbled, “I can’t Seri, if you know, then you might knock us off course!”

  Seri snarled, and her expression grew nearly feral.

  “You think I want to be the one responsible for plunging the world into the Grand Junction!? I say we break that course, smash it right good!”

  Liam snarled at Seri, a very rare moment of defiance.

  “Fine, then go to Harlem and behead your kin! She is the Grand Junction personified! If she lives, the Grand Junction will unfold, and so will the new future that inhumans have all feared for over two-thousand-years!”

  Seri’s heart clenched in her chest and her eyes were like saucers now.

  “This was never a choice for me, was it, Liam?”

  Liam gave her a pitying look and sighed in exasperation.

  “It is, and it isn’t. You could always choose the path of your father, the path of destruction and fear. Or, you can put on your big vampire britches and face the bloody future like a Queen!”

  Seri swore, and she opened auto-fire as another vampire sprinted towards them.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Bix spoke lowly, but with an edge of urgency to her tone.

  “We are not done with this conversation Liam, not by half.”

  Seri declared, her frosty tone told Liam he was going to be suffering her wrath later. Better hers, then her fathers, or the psychopath who calls himself the Baron! Liam sighed, and he opened on two more vampires coming at them from the west. Seri caught one coming from the south at the same time. They were running out of time.

  He didn’t even know the how to his last vision before all visions went black, just that with the creep of dawn, she would come and with her, a new age.

  Thirty-One:

  Sewers were ripe with every odor an inhuman nose would never wish to closely examine. I had sat patiently in the bunker under Manhattan, but I couldn’t leave Seri, Liam and Bix out to face the dangers of Dean alone.

  “I’m going after them, and that’s final!”

  I told Patty and Vivi. The pair had turned into a pair of fussy hens once we reached our hidey-hole. Chelsea clung to her mother’s side, still shook up from the violence earlier. I felt terrible for what that little girl had witnessed. She had been unwilling to hide with the other kids. She had sat on a roof shooting arrows at redcaps with the adults. With her natural vampiric strength, she could fire a bow better than an adult human. Now, she looked haunted. I am not sure why Patty allowed her daughter to participate!

  “You are now the Queen of ALL of Manhattan. You don’t get it Thea, you have achieved the impossible! You have taken out that frosty bitch of a queen who had disrupted our shores and this island for five-hundred-years!”

  I raised my brow in surprise.

  “She claimed to be much older than that…”

  Vivi nodded and said, “Aye, she was, but like most westerners, she migrated. Granted, she was in New York long before most started to migrate.”

  “Either way, I am going out and retrieving my kin. I might not know much about this world, but I do feel, and those feelings are pulling me towards Seri. I can almost feel her panic.”

  Vivi stood and she gave me a look that brokered no arguments.

  “Then I am going with you Princess. You are a royal and I am a dark wood ranger. I am honor-bond to protect you! Even if it is from yourself.”

  My eyes narrowed to slits and I crossed my hands over my chest.

  “Your confidence is inspiring!”

  My tone was drier than toast. Before either of us could do more than lock, the massive metal door banged open and in walked Jeff, one of Seri’s pukas. On his back was a short thirty-something looking man. Jeff smiled at the sight of me, mischief glinted like a very deadly thing in the puka’s eyes.

  “Princess heard you dropped a couple of buildings on a bunch of redcaps. I’m very envious of these damn elves, I would have loved to have been there with popcorn!”

  I ignored his greeting and hitched my thumb to the man on his back.

  “Who’s this? He looks like death warmed over!”

  The puka nodded and he walked over to a mattress we had laid out. We had cots and mattresses laid out all around the floors of the wide rooms of the bunker. Vivi scampered off in the direction of the medical supplies and Patty came to Jeff’s aid and helped him rip the man’s shirt free.

  When I was in range to spot the wound on his shoulder, it was festering. Maggots were crawling from the wound, I nearly retched at the site of the foul-smelling injury. He opened his tired eyes; his age spoke through his heavy lids. I knew who this had to be, just from the look in his eyes.

  “This is the Sky Lord?”

  He looked at me with eyes that had beheld many ages of the earth. He wheezed and nodded his head and somehow managed to look regal, even at death’s door.

  “I am
he, and you are Thea Salvo?”

  His pained voice chilled my spine and I nodded, placing my hand on his good shoulder.

  “I’m Thea Salvo, how can we help you?”

  My voice was calm, but I felt raw fire rushing the length of my body, through every nerve. He couldn’t die! He was the sylph lord! If he died, then all hope of peace died with him!

  “Get my son. I must pass the mantle to him while I still have strength to hold to life. Get him for me Thea Salvo and I will ensure you peace with my people. That is my final request in this existence.”

  His body glowed, and suddenly white and gold wings sprouted from his back. I sucked down a long breath. He laid awkwardly on his winged back now. He reached over and plucked a gilded feather free from his now massive expanse of wings.

  “Go to Brooklyn Domain, show the first sylph you see this feather, tell them you must bring Arius to me. No one can take a feather from a sylph, not unless it is freely given. I would never have relinquished this boon to you, had you not been friend. Fear not, this is tantamount to safe-passage in my son’s new domain.”

  His words sparked a new wildfire inside my heart and body.

  “He took Brooklyn while Seri was gone?”

  Chase nodded his head and turned to the side and began to hack blood up. I leaned in, unable to help myself, I rubbed his chest gingerly and I helped him lean to his side to cough up the bile building in his chest.

  “I should be furious…”

  I whispered to him and Chase held my gaze, something passed between us.

  “You had nothing to do with her death, my Libby.”

  It was a statement of fact, not a question. I nodded, and tears filled my eyes. I had seen death before, and I have killed now, but something in his voice broke my heart. His raw parental love for his child. Something I had never known in my life.

  “I never got to meet her while she was alive. I barely even saw what happened to her. Seri almost killed me on the spot, thinking I did it, but no, I didn’t ever hurt her.”

  He nodded, then he turned and coughed and hacked violently in a fit of pain.