ONSET: Stay of Execution

by Glynn Stewart

  David drew Memoria.

  “I am a child of this world,” he said quietly. “But more than that: I am a guardian of this world. A cop. If you came in peace, perhaps there would be a point to this conversation.

  “But you came with an army through a gateway forged of blood,” David reminded the demon. “And so long as you prey upon the weak, you will find me and mine to bar your way.”

  “Such fire.” The Herald laughed. “Such courage. And your sword, too! Can you feel them, Battle Seer? The souls at your hand? They hear your words, even if they cannot speak, and they burn with righteous anger at those who slew and imprisoned them.

  “An injustice, I think we can both agree. You would wield them against me, and they are willing…but I think that instead, they should be free.”

  It was a quiet thing, the unmaking of Memoria. No grand flash of power. No strikes of lightning or volcanic eruptions.

  One moment, the sword was in David’s hand, glowing its usual dim red light.

  The next, the light was gone, the sword suddenly cold and still in a way it had never been.

  And then it turned to dust in his fingers.

  44

  David White stared at the dust covering his hand.

  His Sight told him that the Herald had actually been honest, too. The souls of the men and women Ekhmez had trapped in the blade had been freed, not destroyed. Despite the circumstances, he couldn’t begrudge the release of those brave people from their imprisonment.

  He smiled, brushing the dust from his hand as he faced the Herald once more.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. “You are right. They deserved to be free.”

  The golden giant demons had closed ranks across the entrance again, blocking the only exit from the Herald’s court for the Black Echelon teams. The resemblance of the space to a colosseum made sense to David now.

  The Herald had built this place to be a battleground. He’d been waiting for David, or someone like him, to bear humanity’s hope against him so he could smash it to pieces.

  The youth smiled, rising from his “throne”—an expensive leather recliner presumably stolen from a nearby furniture store— and stepping down from the dais to face David.

  “Courage. Honor. You really are everything John warned me you’d be,” he noted. “You have the Sight, Commander. You know what awaits the world now. Take a knee,” he offered. “You will find I am not a demanding master. Stand at my side and you will have the power to protect your lover and friends from the Masters. I will not permit my chosen servants to be brushed aside.

  “Kneel, David White, and I will make you a King in the world to come.”

  David realized he’d stepped backward as the Herald approached. He was now flanked by Mages, with Brianna Young on his left with her elf-blade in her hands, and Kate Mason on his right. He could feel their grim determination.

  And, to his amusement, their complete faith that there was no chance of his taking the Herald’s offer.

  “If Buckley told you anything about me,” he replied to the Herald, “then the phrase ‘giant stick up his ass’ almost certainly came up. I don’t have it in me to kneel. I don’t have it in me to sacrifice others for my own safety.”

  He smiled, drawing support from his comrades.

  “I would rather fight you for every soul and lose than knowingly sacrifice one innocent and win,” he told the demon. “This is our world, and for all its flaws and fractures, it is what we made it—and I will not see it remade by a bunch of ancient immortals with fragmented memories!”

  The Herald snarled, raising his hands to summon power.

  “Tatton! Now!”

  There’d been no plan beyond “David kills the Herald with Memoria”. No backup ideas. But David doubted the “quicksilver sharpshooter” didn’t have his insane custom hand cannon out by this point. He dodged sideways as Landon Tatton stepped up to the line with the two Mages and fired before the demon could react.

  No regular human could even fire the seventy-caliber revolver without breaking their wrists. Even many Empowered would fail at fanning the hammer to empty the six-round cylinder—and David doubted that anyone could manage to empty the cylinder and actually hit something.

  Tatton did.

  Six bullets slammed home in the Herald’s torso, each depleted-uranium penetrator tearing a fist-sized hole through the youth’s clothes and flesh. The demon staggered backward, kept standing for a moment only by John Buckley’s magic.

  The cultist’s attempt to protect his master was pointless. The wounds sealed over as David watched, the simple black suit seeming to heal along with the flesh as the Herald stood.

  “Now, that was rude. We were still talking.”

  There was no gesture. No visible strike. One moment, Tatton was standing with them. The next, he was sixty feet back, slamming into the hardened earth walls with bone-crushing force.

  “I am not going to die to petty little bullets,” the demon told them, advancing once more on David’s people. “I think this conversation is…OVER!”

  The final bellowed word echoed through the court, and the Herald moved. Power flared out from him in a seemingly unstoppable wave of force. The same focused strike that had crushed Tatton flicked out at the Black Echelon team…and failed.

  David glanced over at Kate, who was looking strained.

  “We’ve got him held,” she snapped. “We’re containing most of his power, but…”

  But every Mage with him was now tied up protecting themselves and him from the Herald’s power. It was down to him.

  David White nodded to his lover—and charged.

  The Herald met him halfway, both men becoming blurs of motion as they struck. With Memoria gone and the demon’s power suppressed, neither was armed for the first exchange.

  David was stronger and faster than he’d ever been, the apotheosis under Lake Tahoe having increased his Empowered abilities to an entirely new level, but the Herald had a clear physical edge. A double-fisted blow hammered into David’s chest as he reached out, knocking him backward before he could even land a blow.

  Reaching into the future to see what the Herald was going to do next, he sidestepped a snap-kick—and then dropped to the ground to dodge a blast of fire from Buckley. Clearly, the cultists weren’t planning on letting this be a fair fight.

  Neither was David. Judging his moment perfectly, he grabbed the Herald’s next strike in an iron grip, using the demon’s momentum to turn them both around and pull the Herald into the path of his own minions’ attack.

  Black fire and lightning rippled over the demon, earning a hiss of pain as the Herald ripped himself out of David’s grip and leapt back to buy himself space.

  “Stop the Mages!” he barked at his cultists. “This one is mine.”

  David realized suddenly that there were noticeably fewer cultists now than there had been—and that he couldn’t see the two Belmont sisters he’d brought into the court with him.

  Somehow, he suspected those two facts were related. As the Herald came back at him, however, he realized that the demon was far more linked to Buckley than he’d thought.

  The rest of the cultists were obeying his verbal orders, trying to draw Kate Mason and the other Mages into a spell duel. Buckley, however, was using his power to make up for the fact that the Echelon team had suppressed the Herald’s power.

  New, glittering armor of white fire appeared around the Herald’s torso, and a sword of the same burning power flashed into the demon’s hand.

  “Better,” the young-seeming creature snapped. “Come, White. Let us dance.”

  David would have given anything for a sword—or even for Young to wade into this fight with her elf-blade. Unfortunately, the Elfin Second was using her sword as a focus for her power as she single-handedly held off a dozen demon-worshipper Mages—allowing the rest of the Echelon to bring the Herald down to a level David could fight.

  The next few seconds were a desperate quest for survival. The b
urning white blade was everywhere, and it took every ounce of foresight and speed the Battle Seer could muster to not be where it was.

  He wasn’t even trying to fight back. He was just evading, dodging around the sword as the Herald advanced, pushing David farther and farther back…but growing more and more frustrated.

  “Why won’t you die?” he snarled.

  A wild slash that could probably have cleaved a tank missed David’s head by less than an inch, allowing him to charge inside the Herald’s guard. His first blow slammed into the shield of fire wrapped around the demon’s torso. He’d hoped to take the burn and punch through, but the fire was solid and stopped his blow while incinerating his flesh.

  The fiery armor was focused around the Herald’s chest, however, forming a breastplate of Buckley’s power and will. David’s booted foot found the demon’s knee with a bone-crunching snap.

  The body the Herald wore might have been mostly artificial, but the joints worked the same way as human joints. They might have been forged of steel cables and rock and Pure ichor instead of ligaments and bone, but with David’s strength, that was irrelevant.

  The Herald crumpled, a momentary weakness.

  It was enough. David grabbed the demon’s wrist, breaking the artificial bones that made it up in the process, and forced the sword of flaming white fire into the monster’s own face.

  The flame burnt through the false skin. It burnt through earth and stone and ichor and flesh, and seared away the Herald’s face with terrifying power.

  And the creature just laughed. He stood there with a sword of white fire impaling his head and he laughed.

  Then the sword and armor disappeared as an incoherent and unexpected scream sounded across the court—and then cut out.

  David and the Herald both stopped, looking back to the dais where John Buckley had been supporting the creature he’d brought into the world.

  Buckley’s white cassock was stained red now as he crumpled forward, and Amelia Belmont stood above him. As the Herald stared at her, she smiled and tossed him a bloody lump of flesh.

  It rolled across the dirt, rapidly covering itself in bloody mud, but David still realized what it was.

  “Funny,” Belmont said softly. “After what he’d done, I didn’t expect him to have a heart.”

  For the first moment since the fight began, the Herald seemed to take a moment to survey his court. The massive golden demons still barred the way out, turning the court into a modern colosseum. The silver-skinned demons were still keeping watch, making sure no one tried to escape.

  The Mages, however, the humans who were far less willing to unquestionably obey orders and had involved themselves in the fight…were dead. All of them. Young and the two Belmont sisters had massacred them while David and the Herald had been trying to break each other’s limbs.

  The Herald…shrugged, his face and skin rippling as he rebuilt his head around the gaping hole David had burnt through it with his own sword. The dirt and blood around him seemed to flow toward him, his “flesh” bulking up as he grew again.

  His appearance didn’t change. He was still a white-skinned, black-horned, gaunt young man in a plain business suit—but now that young man was twelve feet tall instead of six.

  “Servants, attend me,” he snapped. The melodious voice was gone now, replaced with a harsh growl as he ordered the silver demons to him.

  Young was by David’s side now, her elf-blade glowing blue in shadows cast by the Herald’s black fog. The Belmont sisters were falling back. Their place in this fight was to protect the Mages now.

  “You can’t win,” the Herald told them. “The portal is open. For every Servant and shadow you fell, I can bring through a thousand—and none of the Pure can truly die. I will bring them back across the Seal—an unending, unkillable host that you cannot stop.

  “We will master your technologies and magics alongside our own, and we will undo what has been done. My mothers and fathers will walk this world again, will rule what is rightfully theirs again.”

  “The portal is bound to you,” Young said. “I can feel that binding flowing between it and you. We kill you, the portal closes.”

  He laughed, the sound booming across the court and echoing again and again.

  “You haven’t realized yet?” he demanded. “I cannot die. I am human and Pure and Awakened. I am all these things, and no power of this world or the next can truly harm me. You can contain me. Limit me. You have stolen my power—but the effort is already straining your friends.

  “How long, Miss Young, Commander White, until they start to die?” he asked softly. “How many will you sacrifice to buy yourself the chance to do that which is impossible?

  “Yield. There is still a place for you at my side.”

  “If you’re so confident we can’t kill you, why are you so afraid?” David replied. “Trust me, Herald, I still have a few theories I need to test before we’re done!”

  The now-giant demon laughed and spread his arms, fingernails extended into vicious-looking ten-inch talons.

  “Very well, then. As you humans so love to say: bring it.”

  45

  Magic flared around Young as she summoned the speed and power of the Flame of Andúril, the magic-based martial art any high-ranking Elfin had to master. Glittering blue light encased her and her sword alike as she joined David on the assault.

  The screaming of the overhead dragon fight distracted David for a crucial moment, but the Elfin Second didn’t hesitate. The tall woman unfolded into a blur of blue lightning, her sword nearly reaching the Herald’s new immense form before a massive forearm knocked it aside.

  David was there before the Herald could follow up on his block. A pure-white fist slammed down at the Elfin, but the Seer Saw it coming and intercepted it. He slammed into the Herald’s arm with his entire body, deflecting the strike into the dirt and buying Young a precious few moments to regain her balance.

  That meant the Herald was now focusing on him. Doubling his size didn’t seem to have reduced the demon’s speed or strength at all, and the Seer found himself dodging an inhumanly fast series of blows, any one of which would put even him out of the fight for at least a few minutes.

  He dodged almost all of them, then turned to convert the last strike into a glancing blow that sent him flying rather than crushing his entire torso.

  The distraction was enough for Young to close. For a moment, David thought they’d pulled it off—the elf-blade the Mage carried was one of the few weapons they thought could kill the Herald.

  But the Herald clearly registered the threat. Young managed to hit him, the blade stabbing into his flesh—and then one of those massive white fists smashed down, shattering the blade into a thousand pieces as the Herald’s other hand threw the Mage away from him.

  From the way the Herald breathed heavily and paused to tear the fragment of blade out of himself, the elf-blade had hurt him.

  Unfortunately, it was now destroyed, and David was well and truly out of ideas as the Herald straightened, looming over them all.

  He roared, a wordless shout of anger that hurt the ears and made the earthen walls around them shiver. David and Young fell back toward the Mages, and David desperately tried to search his Sight for something.

  The Belmont sisters had kept the demons off the Mages limiting the Herald, somehow. The pair were nearly invulnerable, but both now bore scratches and bruises that shouldn’t have been able to mark their phased forms.

  Several of the Mages were down now. Their slumps had a disturbing finality to them, and David knew that the Mages were failing. They were dying to buy him and Young time…and he was out of ideas.

  Then there was an answer to the Herald’s roar as two massive creatures collapsed out of the sky. The demon barely managed to sidestep the impact of the falling dragons, and Charles and Serena rolled over the remaining silver demons.

  Powerful and dangerous as those creatures might have been in normal circumstances, the two dragons d
estroyed them instantly, their mass and claws more than enough to end creatures that could have withstood tank shells.

  Serena emerged on top for a moment, the Mage on her back glittering with power as she augmented the female dragon’s strength and speed to allow her to match the much larger Charles.

  And then a single gunshot rang out across the court. Everyone turned in surprise to see Landon Tatton, barely half-sitting on broken limbs…but holding an M4 Omicron rifle someone had dropped. He only had one working hand and had barely propped up the rifle…but Landon Tatton didn’t miss.

  The dragon-riding Mage froze in mid-gesture, her hand slipping to her chest and coming away bloody as she coughed, suddenly the center of all attention.

  And then she slumped, the magic she’d sustained around Serena failing—and Charles turned the entire situation around in moments, pinning the other dragon to the ground as he looked around at the mess of the battle.

  It was clear, to David at least, that Charles’s advantage was temporary. The female dragon would quickly escape and return to the sky, where she had a mobility advantage. But for those few seconds, the dragon could spare the attention to see how the fight was progressing—and then he did something David would never have expected.

  One of his long, scimitar-like claws suddenly extended out to its full length and the dragon bit down on it. With a hiss of pain that drove half of the humans on the battlefield to their knees, he pulled the claw out—and tossed it to Kate Mason with a flick of his head.

  “You know what to do!” he barked—and then was gone, chasing into the sky after the other dragon as she escaped him.

  David had no idea what Charles was expecting Kate to do—and neither, it seemed, did the Herald. Everyone stopped, staring at the Mage with the dragon claw embedded in the ground in front of her.

  The power-containing field the Mages were conjuring was being funneled through Kate. Even with their losses, she wielded the power of eight of the most powerful Mages Black Echelon had been able to find. For a single intense moment, she found a new use for it.