And even if you do, Harry, those black creatures will get you. They’re like his lapdogs, his own version of Wolves.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know,” Bezel said. “We are one in the same. You sense it as much as I sense it. You hear the whispers.”
“No,” Harold wheezed. “I-I’m not like you.”
“Oh, are you better?”
Harold nodded weakly.
“Then why are you on your knees before me? Why are bowing to me?” Bezel laughed again, then he stormed over to Harold. The circle of blackness encroaching them seemed to come closer. Harold smiled as much as his burnt face would allow him. It was fitting, really, the blackness that got closer and closer. A metaphor, perhaps, for the death he would finally meet.
He closed his eyes, dropping the sword, faintly hearing it clatter off of the stones his knees rested on.
Then he heard something so familiar, something that reminded him of simpler times. It was the sound of a crossbow. The twang of the string. The whoosh of the arrow parting the smoky air.
Then a scream.
Of pain. Of rage. Of confusion.
Harold opened his eyes. A shaft jutted out from the Dark One’s chest in the hollow cavity where his heart would be. His eyebrows raised to his hairline.
A trickle of black blood rolled down his shirt.
“Got you that time,” Frank King said.
Harold smiled as all Hell broke loose.
CHAPTER 56
Frank searched for another arrow, but what he grabbed was not what he expected. Their path down the steep staircase had been uneventful. It wasn’t until they broke through the darkness and stepped into the orange light that Frank and Boris realized how much shit they were in. So what did Frank do? He unknowingly went and shot the Devil himself with an arrow. A futile gesture, but one that got the asshole’s attention.
Now, Frank’s hand gripped something scaly, something slimy. He spun around and was face to face with an eyeless dark figure. It was the type of beast you’d find in Hell’s basement. He hadn’t even noticed them. They had stuck to the shadows, watching, waiting. There were hundreds — thousands, maybe. With a slight scream, Frank let go and stumbled backward.
Two more pounced on him as he lost his balance.
Flames lit up the darkness. Flesh burned. Boris crouched, his small horse body kicked up onto his hind legs. He smacked a couple of the damned creatures in the face, their heads exploding into a cloud of ash and soot. But they kept coming.
Frank scrambled his way back up the steps. Over the sea of blackness, backlit by the rising fire, Frank saw Charlie pull the arrow free, saw the squirt of black blood, the same black blood that had inhabited Frank not long ago.
The two of them caught eyes for just a split second, and it was enough time for Frank to realize he was not Charlie at all. He was something much worse. Shudders began to rack through his body despite the mounting heat and the sweat pouring off his forehead, getting caught in the silvery stubble on his face. This was the Dark One, the orchestrator of voices, the ruler of the Shadows.
Frank King had just shot Satan.
“Frank!” Boris yelled.
He pulled his eyes away from the gaunt figure towering over Harold Storm and looked to Boris. He was somewhere in a pile of limbs and gnashing faces. Frank located his right hand. He pulled Boris a few feet out of the descending pile, stabbing at the damned souls with his other arrow-filled hand.
They screeched and writhed, but they did not disappear nor did they stop.
Harold screamed. “If you are going to do it, then do it! No more of this, please.”
Frank heard the Dark One’s cackling.
He was faced with a decision, save Harold Storm or save Boris. A glance over his shoulder, hand still clamped onto Boris’ arm, showed a dark blade rising above the Dark One’s head.
Frank ground his teeth as he pulled Boris free from the pile. He had made up his mind.
He would save both.
CHAPTER 57
A vein popped from Beth’s forehead as Sahara stared her down, their blades locked. Neither one of them would give up any ground.
Beth’s knee pummeled through the air and into Sahara’s gut, but she was expecting such a dirty trick from the likes of a Shadow Eater. Though she couldn’t move, she could brace herself. The blow hurt, no doubt, but it was not enough to cause Sahara to retract her blade, and with it, her guard.
She took the hit, then rolled backward, causing Beth to stumble forward. Now on the ground, Sahara scissored her legs around Beth’s ankle, taking her down. They rolled in the dirt, their blades gone from their hands. Old dirt and dust choked her lungs, but she fought the coughs away, ignored the stale taste of destruction in the back of her throat.
Beth went for Sahara’s eyes, thumbs jammed into the closed lids. Sahara cried out as she shook her head free. A moment longer and she knew what to expect. Claws about three inches long would’ve exploded from the ends of the Shadow Eater’s fingertips.
She kicked herself up. Beth followed, her blade on a patch of uneven road in between them. Their eyes locked, then narrowed.
It was Sahara’s chance, and she took it. Unfortunately, so did Beth. They rushed each other. Beth was faster.
A blur of blackness swung upward at Sahara. Her scream was cut short by a searing pain in her thigh.
Beth smirked.
Sahara looked down. Blood spilled from a deep gash, the skin around the wound fizzled, burning away slowly. She dropped down on one knee, not because she wanted to but because she had to. Her leg had given out. Tears filled her eyes.
“Too slow, Realm Protector.” She cackled. “I would’ve thought you to be a better fighter than the charred one. I guess I thought wrong.”
The words barely registered. The pain was too much. She wasn’t sure if it was her that screamed or her skin.
“I could make it fast,” Beth said. “Quick and painless. Might be the way you would do it to me. But I’ve got time while Bezel cleans up the mess you brought here. And my life has been positively lacking in the fun department. What would be more fun than watching you bleed from your gut while your skin burns from the inside out?”
Again, Sahara barely registered the words. All she registered was: fun, bleed, gut, burn. Not good words at all. She felt like passing out, or maybe she felt like dying. In her life as a Realm Protector, she had taken her fair share of bumps and bruises, but nothing like this. Nothing so supernatural, so deadly.
She called for Felix, called for her mother — a figure of light she barely remembered — and most of all, she called for Harold Storm.
Beth brought the blade behind her head like an executioner, and the swing was aimed to slice her in half.
CHAPTER 58
But Frank could not save them both, even if he was twenty years younger. It was just not feasible. There were too many of the black monsters, and they seemed to roll out of the fire at a rate quicker than the smoke.
Then more were on Boris.
Frank’s hands were slick and slipping, then finally gone.
Boris cried out, his eyes dazed. The hand slowly retracted into the black pile of bodies.
“No!” Frank yelled, but his voice was drowned by the clawing, the ripping, the tearing apart of Boris’ insides. They gnawed at him like dogs over a bone with bits of meat still on it, like beasts, like animals.
“Boris!”
“Get him for me…” Boris said, barely audible. And his face vanished, his screams silent. He had been erased by Satan’s minions.
“You will bow to me before I kill you. You will give yourself over to the darkness, to the Shadows, Harold Storm,” the Dark One said.
Frank held on to his crossbow tight, but they were on him, too. As fast as they were on Boris. The same pack, the same pile of blackness, of eyeless faces.
“No. NO! Nooooo!” Harold said.
Frank caught a glimpse of the Centaur. He was no longer Boris anymore, he was just a
pile of clothes and bones. But something else caught Frank’s eye, something darker than everything in the Black Pits.
It was the rock, that shiny, matte rock Boris wore around his neck. Frank didn’t know why, but at that moment nothing else mattered except for that rock.
Not Harold.
Not the Realms.
Not the death of Boris.
And not revenge for his fallen son.
Just the rock.
“Enough!” Harold shouted. His voice was distant, sounding much farther than it actually was. “Okay, okay, I pledge myself.”
“To what?”
Harold screamed again. Through the screams, Frank faintly heard the Realm Protector’s answer: “To your death.”
“Wrong!” the Dark One shouted.
Just that rock, Frank thought. All I need is that damned rock, then it will be okay.
He was willing to lose his arm for that small piece of magic — Magic, he thought again, listen to yourself, Frank. Your father would kick you in the ass if he heard you talking about this shit.
Destroy, another part of Frank’s mind said. That’s exactly right. Destroy. Destroy. “Destroy!” he shouted.
He dove for it. Clawed feet and hands scraped at his back. The crossbow buckled under his weight. He crawled through the fire on his belly like a soldier in the muck. And when he reached out to grab it, nails digging and puncturing the soft flesh of his sides, blood pouring from fresh wounds, the pain quieted. And the damned souls of Hell fled, already sensing they were too late.
“You should’ve pledged, Harold Storm. Because now you have lost,” the Dark One said in a booming voice.
“No, asshole,” Frank roared, turning over on his back. The Dark One swung his Hellblade down, and for a moment, Frank froze. He thought he was too late, but he wasn’t. Harold raised his own blade as a last-ditch effort. It was not much, but it might have saved him the rest of his face. The steel of their blades banged together, filling the silence, and it brought Frank back to the moment. And now he was no longer thinking as much as he was acting on autopilot.
Because sometimes, you can’t think, sometimes you just have to act, and that’s what he did, what his arm did. He threw the rock with as much strength as he had left in his worn-out body.
It whistled through the air like a bomb, and even without his crossbow, Frank King never missed.
It struck the intersection of their crossing blades with a soft clink.
The Dark One’s eyes bulged, then, like Frank’s and like Harold’s, his eyes jammed close with the force of the explosion and the burst of beautiful, brilliant white light.
Then blackness enveloped them all.
CHAPTER 59
She teased her at first. Not wanting to kill her, only wanting to make a mark, a horrible, torturous mark in Sahara’s unblemished skin.
She was on her back, bucking like a dying animal, Beth’s boot wedged beneath her chin, choking the frozen air from her lungs. The pain so intense that not even her Panthers would enter her mind. No Panthers, no Deathblade.
With both hands wrapped around the hilt of her own blade, Beth cut at Sahara’s middle. Her tongue sticking out between her lips, eyes nothing but concentration.
“Let everyone know who took down the Realm Protectors. Let them all know,” Beth said in a voice on the verge of madness.
What she carved into Sahara was the symbol known throughout the Realms as the Shadow Eater’s. It was a set of jagged teeth with a cat’s eye in the middle. Sahara wasn’t one hundred percent sure — the pain was almost too much — but she figured Beth had just finished the top set of teeth and had made her first mark of the eye.
Not one hundred percent sure about that, however she was more than one hundred percent sure she would die.
She had never prayed to the Creator, often thinking a being such as him or her would be too busy with such trivial things as listening to a lowly Realm Protector whine and complain about why her life was no good or why she deserved it to be better. Maybe that was true, but right at that moment in Sahara’s long life, none of that mattered.
She prayed. Oh God, did she pray.
“Such a shame I can’t keep you alive so you can meet him — ” Beth said, but a deep rumbling in the road cut her off.
She let the blade up from Sahara’s skin. The pain was momentarily relieved, but a burning came back to the wound almost instantaneously. Despite that, Sahara followed her gaze to where the entryway to the Black Pits stood, where two large, curved stone pillars stood.
The pillars began to teeter back and forth as if an earthquake threatened to crack the ground in half. Then there was a burst of white light.
A scream from a million voices all morphing into one cacophony of pain and agony.
Sahara’s eyes shut as a reflex. Then it was over; the darkness invaded the world again, barely leaving an afterglow from the explosion.
All was quiet. It was not the calm before the storm, Sahara knew, but rather the calm after the storm.
In all the excitement, Beth had forgotten about Sahara. She walked a few paces away, her shoulders sagging. The Hellblade fell to the road, bouncing once then sending a cloud of bitter dust into the air.
“No,” Beth mumbled. “No!” The Shadow Eater fell to her knees, throwing her arms up to the violently black sky.
Sahara pulled herself up, careful to not make any noise. The pain prevented her from rising more than a half-kneeling position, and it was still too intense to call on her own Deathblade.
Her hand closed around the hilt of the Hellblade. She almost pulled away from the iciness of it. It had felt like death. Cold. Empty. Yet so powerful.
Sahara raised it up as high as she could — which was not much. And in a hoarse voice drowned with pain, she said, “I’m afraid so.”
Beth snapped her head back just in time to see the shimmering blade coming at her. Sahara felt the vibration of the Shadow Eater’s spine detaching from itself.
Beth gasped.
Sahara screamed.
Then Beth turned forward, looking down at the point which drove through her middle. A shaky hand reached out and touched it, a glob of black blood settling on her finger then slowly falling off.
Beth went up in a cloud of darkness, leaving behind nothing…not even her soul.
Sahara hit the road not long after, and she passed out from pain, from shock, but most importantly, from victory.
CHAPTER 60
Harold’s ears rang. His body convulsed as he tried to cough out the dust and smoke that had filled his lungs. Before the explosion, he was facing the fire. Now, the fire seemed to be dwindling and Harold seemed to be on the opposite side of the great, stone cavern. Tendrils of black wafted from charred bodies. The smell of cooked flesh filled his nose. He felt as if he were floating and possibly dead.
His eyes scanned the room, not remembering for the life of him what exactly he was looking for. So he got up in an attempt to jog his memory.
The sword of Orkane was ruined beyond repair. He saw chunks of silver like a broken mirror littering the area where their blades met. There didn’t seem to be anything left of the Dark One’s blade, or whatever had caused the explosion. Harold chalked that up to a testament of the Orkane’s power, and he smiled.
But the smile quickly vanished once he remembered what he was looking for.
“Frank,” he wheezed. “Frank!” He saw no body that wasn’t blackened, that wasn’t dead, but he saw Frank’s crossbow. Somehow, it seemed to be in good shape. It was beat up, but Harold reckoned still workable. His tired mind put two and two together and he thought: That means Frank’s okay…he wouldn’t go before his crossbow would.
“Frank!” he called again.
For a moment, there was no answer but the sizzling of dying flames. Then, far away, he heard moaning. With rubbery legs — Harold had been drunk enough times to know how to move on them, thankfully — he rushed to the sounds of the moans. It led him to a pile of the dead souls, now in
their physical forms. They started to shift and wriggle like a pile of snakes. Harold jumped back, trying to convince his mind that he’d be ready to fight. But the face of an old man, blackened by soot and death, popped out between a pair of shoulders.
Harold’s mouth hung open.
“You gonna stand there looking like a dickhead, or are you gonna help me out?” Frank said.
Harold broke out in laughter, only interrupted by a series of coughing fits. It took about thirty seconds for him to clear the dead, and he helped Frank to his feet, then wrapped his arms around him. He felt like crying. They were walking to the stairs, walking to their freedom, nimbly avoiding bits of sword and the dead scattered at their feet when Harold spoke up. “Boris?” he asked.
Frank shook his head. “No, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him,” Frank said. “Little bastard was something else, I’ll give him that. May he rest in peace.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to do anything without you guys,” Harold said, shaking his head. He stared at Frank with a burning intensity, but the old man did not meet his gaze. “All of you.”
“Aw, don’t hit me with that sentimental bullshit already,” Frank said, then he hesitated. “Hold on, where’s my cross…” he trailed off, looking over Harold’s shoulder, his eyes blossoming into wide, white O’s.
Suddenly, all the warmth was sucked from the cavern.
“You did nothing, Harold Storm,” a voice said — an all too familiar voice.
Harold whirled around. He was again face to face with pure, unspeakable evil. The Dark One stood before him in Charlie’s skin, now ruined. Half of his face had melted off. Where one eyeball used to be was nothing but hollow darkness and white jelly dripping down his cheek like a cracked egg. Harold could see the backs of his teeth, the tendons dancing as he flexed his jaw.
Deathbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 3) Page 25
