Melanthius entered from the tunnel outside, walking purposefully toward Reve Azrael, who stood at the foot of the throne. In his hands was the box.
I spat on the floor. That fucking box. I wished I’d destroyed the damn thing after all.
I worked the ropes again and felt a loop slip free.
Melanthius knelt before Reve Azrael and held the box out to her, his golden skull mask betraying no emotion. Reve Azrael opened the lid, reached into the box, and pulled out Stryge’s severed head.
“At last,” she said, holding the head aloft. “Now you will bear witness to my triumph. By day’s end, this city will be unmade. Nothing will make a sound, nothing will move without my will commanding it.”
Another loop of rope loosened and slipped, and then my hands were free. I tossed the rope on the ground and ran for Reve Azrael. I had to get Stryge’s head from her before she could join it to his body. Big Joe got in my way. His cold, meaty, dead fist knocked me down. He sprang at me, but I rolled away and he landed in the dirt.
“Stop this,” Reve Azrael ordered, but I was already on my feet and running again. The other revenants formed a protective circle around her. That would have been bad news if I’d wanted to get at Reve Azrael, but she wasn’t where I was headed anymore. By gathering around her, the revenants had left the stash of weapons unguarded.
The chrome plating of my Bersa semiautomatic glittered at the top of the heap, its magazine full again thanks to Bethany. I made a mental note to buy her something nice, and reached for the gun.
Big Joe tackled me from behind before I could pick it up. I got a faceful of dirt as I went down. The heavy revenant pinned me to the floor. I managed to squirm onto my back, and face him. His glowing red eyes stared into mine. “This is foolish, my little fly,” Reve Azrael said through him. “You cannot escape. Not from me.”
“I’m not your little fly,” I said. My fingers scrabbled along the dirt floor until I found a good-sized stone. I brought it up and smashed it against the side of Big Joe’s head. It tore a chunk of skin off his skull. He tumbled off me.
I moved quickly, scrambling on all fours for my gun. I grabbed it and spun around just as Big Joe came at me again. I pulled the trigger. The top of Big Joe’s head blew off in a spray of blood dust, bone, and brain matter, and he keeled over. This time, he stayed down.
“Trent, behind you!” Bethany shouted from inside the cage.
Before I could turn around, a dead, foul-smelling arm snaked around my neck in a sleeper hold. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tomo’s half-burnt face glaring back at me. “Enough,” Reve Azrael said through Tomo’s mouth. “Why do you keep trying to thwart me? Give up. You cannot win.”
The sleeper hold tightened, cutting off my oxygen. I started to feel light-headed. I had to act fast. In another few seconds I would black out. I brought up the Bersa, positioned it under Tomo’s chin, and blasted a nine-millimeter slug straight up through his skull. Tomo’s hold relaxed, and he fell off me. I wiped his thick, sludgy blood off my face and looked down at the bodies.
God, I’d just killed Tomo and Big Joe. My hands were shaking.
“Do not lie to yourself,” Reve Azrael said, back in Thornton’s body. “It gave you pleasure to destroy those two. No doubt it is something you wanted to do for a very long time. There is so much anger in you. We have that in common, you and I. There is much anger in both of us. The only difference is that you keep yours bottled up, while this wretched city will soon feel the brunt of mine.”
Just the sound of her talking infuriated me. I pointed the gun at her and cocked it. “We have nothing in common.” She was using Thornton as her host body, and though I didn’t want to, if I got past the revenants surrounding her I was going to have to put a bullet in Thornton’s head.
But not before I got some answers out of her.
Her revenants came at me in a rush. I only managed to squeeze off a couple of shots, neither of which did any good, before they were upon me. Cold, bony fists struck my face, stomach, and sides. Overwhelmed, I doubled over to protect myself from the pummeling. The gun was pulled out of my hand, and finally the beating stopped. I was pulled upright again, my arms pinned behind my back. I was winded, weak, and in pain. There was nothing I could do to stop her.
“Now,” Reve Azrael said, “let us proceed.”
The beam of sunlight coming through the hole in the ceiling moved to the middle of the rings on the wall, where it illuminated the blank circle at the center. As soon as the light touched it, the stone circle spun around on hidden gears. The blank side disappeared into the wall, and on the reverse side was the carving of a grotesque face, like something out of a nightmare, its tusked maw open in a roar, its eyes hollow black pits. A loud grinding noise came from above, echoing through the chamber. A huge stone slab began slowly lowering along the wall above the archway, held by thick ropes attached to an ancient pulley system. It was a system designed to seal Stryge inside at the moment of the equinox, I realized, a backup plan in case anyone was foolish enough to awaken him. The Lenape Indians had been clever. Maybe a little too clever. I didn’t see us getting out before the stone slab blocked the exit.
“The time has come,” Reve Azrael said. She climbed up onto one of the throne’s armrests and lifted Stryge’s head toward the stump of his neck.
“Don’t!” I shouted. The revenants pulled my arms back harder to shut me up. It did the trick. I winced in pain.
Reve Azrael placed Stryge’s head over his neck. A bright, sizzling light appeared between the two ends. The head and neck began to knit together, tendrils of flesh, muscle, and bone reaching toward each other, joining and pulling tight. Reve Azrael let go of the head and jumped down to the floor.
“Awaken, Stryge!” she said, looking up at her handiwork. “Awaken and become my weapon!”
The light that had filled the seam between Stryge’s head and neck vanished, as did the seam itself, and the Ancient became whole again. His chest swelled suddenly, filling with air. Stryge’s first breath in centuries, and the sound of it was like the howling of the wind.
“What have you done?” I said.
“Given birth,” she replied, “to my glorious city of the dead.”
Surprisingly, the revenants let go of me then. Reve Azrael turned away, and she, Melanthius, and the revenants walked to the archway. Above them, the stone slab continued to lower slowly.
“Wait, where are you going?” I demanded, hurrying after them. A fat revenant like a walking boulder pushed me back. The message was clear: This was as far as I went. I watched them file out into the tunnel.
“The rest is for you to do, my little fly, not me,” Reve Azrael said.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Why, kill Stryge, of course.”
I blinked at her, dumbfounded. “What? How? He already had his head cut off four hundred years ago and he’s not dead yet. There isn’t a weapon on Earth that can kill him!”
“Isn’t there?” she said. “You’d better figure it out quickly, unless you want to see your companions die. Stryge despises all humans with a bitter passion. What do you think he will do when he wakes up and the first thing he sees is a cage full of them?”
“Why did you bother waking him if you just…?” I trailed off as I pieced it together. In that moment, her plan spread out like a roadmap in my mind, and it all became horribly clear. “Oh, God,” I said. “You woke Stryge in order to kill him. You’re going to turn him into a revenant.”
She smirked at me. “And then all Stryge’s power as an Ancient will be mine to command. My most powerful revenant yet. Undead. Unstoppable. A perfect storm of destruction.”
A chill ran down my spine. Gregor had warned us an immortal storm was coming, a force so powerful it threatened everything. Even if I didn’t believe in prophecies, I had to admit this one was starting to sound pretty damn accurate. Stryge as a revenant under Reve Azrael’s control would very much be an immortal storm.
“You’re insane,” I said. “I wo
n’t help you.”
“Then your companions will die, and this city will be destroyed regardless.”
“He’ll kill you, too,” I pointed out. “You won’t be safe from him.”
“You think I fear death?” Reve Azrael said. “Death bends to my will, I do not bend to its.”
The stone slab dropped down over the archway then, striking the floor with a heavy thud. It cut me off from Reve Azrael and sealed me inside.
I looked back at Stryge. He sat on his throne, his eyes still closed, his chest swelling and falling with breath. How much time was left before he was fully awake? Not a lot, I guessed. And was I imagining it, or did the broken stubs of his tusks suddenly look longer than they had before, as if they were growing back?
I grabbed my gun off the floor and pocketed it. I pulled Gabrielle’s morningstar off the pile of weapons, then ran to the cage. “Stand back from the door!” I shouted. I swung the weapon’s spiked head into the lock. The door didn’t budge. Damn. If Isaac were awake he probably could have blown the door off its hinges with a wave of his hand, but the mage was still unconscious on the floor, bleeding from the back of his head. I hit it again, with no effect.
Bethany came up to the door. “You’re just going to bend the lock out of shape like that, and then you’ll never get it open. There’s a charm in my vest, third pocket down, right over my stomach. It can get the door open, but you’re going to have to reach in there and get it. I can’t.”
She pushed herself up against the bars. I dropped the morningstar and tried to put my hand in her pocket, but the angle was off. She pushed herself closer, as close as the bars would allow, and I did the same, until we were so close I could smell a faint floral scent coming off of her hair. I managed to slide my hand into the pocket over her stomach. I could feel the unusual warmth of her skin radiating through the material.
“We just keep finding ourselves like this, don’t we?” I said.
Bethany looked past me at Stryge. “Trent, hurry!”
My fingers grazed something inside the pocket, a long, thin, metallic object. I pulled it out. It was the same charm I’d seen her take out of the drawer at Citadel, the small metal tube topped with a beveled glass bead.
“Touch the glass to the lock,” she said, stepping back. “Gently,” she added.
I did. There was a sudden shower of sparks, and the door swung open. I ran into the cage and untied Bethany’s hands. Once she was free, she rushed to untie Gabrielle. I freed Philip and took the silver chain from around his neck, tossing it aside. He breathed a sigh of relief, rubbing the red marks it had left on his neck. Then he picked up Isaac, and ran like a blur for the stone slab blocking the exit. By the time the rest of us caught up to him, he had already laid Isaac gently on the ground and was trying to push the stone aside, but even his immense strength wasn’t enough to move it.
“Help me,” Philip said. “We’ve got to move this thing—”
A low rumble of a growl echoed through the chamber.
I froze, then turned around very slowly. We all did.
Stryge’s eyes were open. They burned like fires in their sockets—cold, white fires, the same as Gregor’s eyes. Maybe those were traits all Ancients shared, I thought, invincibility and freaky eyes. Then Stryge stood up out of the throne, effortlessly snapping the chains that bound him. His tusks had regrown to their full length. His vast wings unfolded from his back.
The last of the broken chains slid off his shoulders and crashed loudly to the floor at his feet. Then Stryge noticed us, and let loose an angry, deafening roar that shook the chamber’s walls.
“Guys,” I said, “I think we should run.”
Thirty-nine
Stryge charged, his enormous, clawed feet pounding the floor so hard it felt like the whole chamber would collapse. Philip slung Isaac’s unconscious body over his shoulder, and sped to the other side of the room. The rest of us scattered out of Stryge’s way. The Ancient slammed into the stone slab that covered the archway. The stone cracked, a long fissure that ran lengthwise from top to bottom, but Stryge himself was unharmed. He turned toward us, bellowing his rage.
We ran for the weapons. Bethany snatched up the Anubis Hand, Gabrielle grabbed her morningstar, and I picked up Philip’s broadsword. I shouted his name and tossed it across the chamber to him.
Philip moved quickly. He jumped for it, grabbing the sword in midair, flipped, and landed on Stryge’s back. The Ancient batted him with his wings, trying to knock him off, but Philip held on. He stabbed the sword into Stryge’s back, but the blade snapped, the tip shattering against the Ancient’s invulnerable hide and leaving Philip holding a hilt with half a blade.
Stryge pulled him off his back with one claw and tossed him away like a toy. The vampire struck the wall where the circles had been carved, and then tumbled to the floor, landing in the column of sunlight that streamed through the hole in the ceiling. He screamed as the sunlight touched his bare face, reflecting like spotlights in his mirrored shades. His skin reddened into boils and began to steam.
“Philip!” I shouted, but I couldn’t reach him. He was all the way on the other side of the chamber, and a pissed off, thirty-foot-tall Ancient stood between us.
Philip thrashed in pain. He covered his face with his gloves and managed to drag himself out of the light. He pulled his hood up to protect himself, tried to stand, and fell back down. After that, he didn’t move. I hoped he was still alive, but there was no way to tell how badly injured he was.
Bethany ran at Stryge, preparing to strike him with the Anubis Hand. He kicked her away. The staff flew from her hands as she tumbled through the air and landed hard, headfirst, against the wall near me. When she slumped over, I saw blood in her hair.
I picked up the Anubis Hand and gritted my teeth angrily. “All right, you ugly son of a bitch.” I ran at him, clutching the Anubis Hand so tightly my knuckles went hot. But before I had a chance to swing it, he knocked me aside with a single sweep of his enormous hand. The sheer force of the blow sent me sliding across the floor until my back hit the wall next to Philip. I winced in pain. Next to me, the vampire was curled on the floor, unconscious but still breathing. That was the good news. The bad news was that Gabrielle and I were the only ones left conscious to fight an enormous, unkillable Ancient, but she only had one good arm and I wasn’t feeling all that solid after Stryge’s backhand. Frankly, the odds sucked.
Gabrielle pointed her morningstar at Stryge. In my dazed state, I thought it a strange way to hold what was essentially a club. But she’d taken it from Isaac’s vault, and Isaac didn’t keep ordinary weapons in there, only magical artifacts. The spiked ball at the end of the morningstar began to glow, and a bright sunburst of light exploded from it, like a flashbulb going off directly in Stryge’s face. Stryge bellowed in rage, throwing one arm over his eyes and flailing angrily with the other. Apparently he didn’t like bright light any more than other gargoyles did. Disoriented and in pain, he stumbled and fell, crashing into the enormous stone slab a second time.
This time, the slab broke apart, crumbling into rubble under his weight and revealing the tunnel outside. Unfortunately, I was still too stunned to get up and run. But that didn’t mean Gabrielle couldn’t.
“The door’s open! Go!” I shouted to her. She didn’t listen. She blasted Stryge with more light from the morningstar. The Ancient roared in pain. As her confidence built, she moved closer to him, intensifying the light. Stryge shrieked in agony. One wing unfurled and, before Gabrielle saw it coming, it swatted her away. She flew backward through the air and slammed into the metal bars of the cage. She yelped in pain and dropped the morningstar.
Stryge stood up again. He didn’t look seriously injured, just a whole lot angrier than before.
Damn. We’d gone up against an Ancient and had our asses handed to us. What more could we do? There was no way to stop him. I wished I had Van Lente’s sword so I could at least cut off Stryge’s head again. It wouldn’t kill him, but I’d settle fo
r dormant at this point.
Stryge towered above us as we lay injured and pathetic on the floor of his tomb. I thought for sure he would stomp us into hamburger, but the Ancient hardly took notice of us. Instead, he looked up at the ceiling. He took a deep breath, the sound like the rush of a waterfall, and his whole body swelled. The shadows seemed to gather around him, pulled from the corners of the chamber, flowing into him. Then he exhaled with a mighty roar, and a beam of dark red light exploded out of him, shooting up to the ceiling.
And through it.
The light, or whatever it was, broke effortlessly through the rocks and earth, raining stones and clods of dirt down into the chamber. I covered my head. Boulders crashed to the center of the room, smashing the throne to rubble and sending up a cloud of dust. I couldn’t see Bethany on the other side of the chamber anymore. I had no idea if she was alive or dead after the rockfall.
The chamber kept shaking. It felt like an earthquake, like the whole world was tearing itself apart. The red beam coming out of Stryge’s form continued shooting past the enormous hole it had blasted in the ceiling, rising higher and higher into the sky itself. The warring factions of gargoyles, so far up from where I lay that they looked like tiny black bats, scattered out of its path. Finally, the beam seemed to explode in midair. The blue sky turned dark with clouds that billowed out of nowhere. Red and black clouds, like nothing I’d ever seen before, roiling like an angry sea.
The strange beam disappeared, but the quaking didn’t stop. Stryge spread his wings and began to flap, lifting off the ground toward the hole he’d blasted in the ceiling.
No, I thought. I wasn’t going to let it be that easy for him.
I forced myself to stand, and ran toward him, scooping the Anubis Hand off the floor. It was hard to keep upright with the whole chamber shaking. I jumped and clung to the lower half of Stryge’s leg as he flew up toward the hole. Stryge roared at me, angry that my weight was throwing him off balance. He tried to kick me off. I held on for dear life with both arms wrapped around his enormous calf, trying not to fall, and trying not to let go of the Anubis Hand, either. Unfortunately, holding on this tight, I didn’t have the leverage to use the staff against him.
Dying Is My Business Page 38
