Somewhere in the midst of the chill and the pain, I became aware of another chittering cry. For a minute, I thought it was yet another cacodaimon, coming to make a meal of me—but it didn’t sound quite right. Looking wildly around, I spotted one of Lil’s little beasts, doing some kind of angry ferret dance as it squeaked a challenge at the cacodaimon. Maybe it was trying to work up its courage before striking. Under less dire circumstances, it might have seemed comical.
As it was, I found myself staring, too muddled by pain to muster a coherent response.
Then the spirit-ferret launched itself at the cacodaimon on my back, a wriggling projectile of teeth and blonde fur. The sound of the little beast’s war cry dredged a brief flash from childhood memory. A name—Rikki Tikki Tavi. That was a mongoose. This was a ferret, but the effect was the same.
With an angry hiss, the bold critter sank its teeth into the rubbery meat at the base of the cacodaimon’s flaring hood. The tenacious little bugger was still clinging to that spot when the cacodaimon reared back, pulling half out of me. It shrieked and tried to shake the ferret off, unsuccessfully.
The misbegotten spawn of shadows didn’t detach itself from my legs, but by then it didn’t have to. It moved enough for me to throw my shoulders back and grab onto its central mass. Digging my fingers into the meat of the thing, I brought a nimbus of blue-white fire to my hands.
With a furious cry, I tore it away like the leech it was, whipping it around to face me. It scrabbled against the front of my jacket, seeking some kind of purchase, but before it could work its way around or through the leather, I intoned the syllables of my name, lashing out and sundering it at the core.
The ferret wisely dashed to safety at the last possible instant.
“Two down,” I gasped, my head, wings, and legs throbbing. “No, three. How many more could be out there?”
I knelt for a few heartbeats, struggling to catch my breath. The fourth cacodaimon continued circling. I still didn’t see Dorimiel anywhere, and that worried me.
A fifth squirming nightmare slunk onto the ship. It hugged the deck, skittering toward the man Dorimiel had eaten. The chitinous horror quested around the fallen man’s form, moving sinuously along the curve of his shoulders and spine. For a minute, it looked for all the world like it was spooning him—then it slid right into his body, as if he were an empty suit of clothes.
The guy lumbered to his feet, shambling in a circle as the cacodaimon tested out his nerves. I wanted to be sick all over my boots, but there really wasn’t time. Even as the not-quite-dead man staggered toward where Remy and Sal still struggled with Jubiel, the nearest creature slashed at me. I threw up my hands in defense, and it raised angry welts on my wrists and palms.
Two more were calling in the distance. I was already worn pretty thin—if those joined the fight it wasn’t going to be pretty.
Where the hell is Lil? I wondered.
As I pinned the fourth cacodaimon to the deck and dragged my blades through its clammy flesh, the ferret shrieked a warning, then danced away in haste. I reacted a moment too late.
A vise-like hand seized the shoulder of my biker jacket. Pallid green eyes agleam, Dorimiel lifted me bodily to my feet. He called power to his twisted hand, and I finally got to see what was wrong with it. His fingers were blackened and warped, the skin shrunk tight against the bones. Dark veins ran up his arm to the elbow, pulsing visibly against his discolored flesh. Each finger was tipped with a scythe-like claw. The shape was unnervingly familiar—alien, insectile—
“You ate one of them,” I choked as he twisted me around to face him. “You ate a fucking cacodaimon.”
Dorimiel loomed over me, easily as tall as Saliriel, if not a little taller. A wild light gleamed in his poisonous eyes, manic and completely unhinged. He gave a smile that made gooseflesh flee down my spine.
“He was a messenger. I misunderstood. I tried to destroy him, but he transformed me. It was glorious.” Leering scant inches from my face, he hissed, “I’ll make you a part of me, too, Anakim. Then you’ll see.”
He lifted his tainted hand, the darkness throbbing around his clawed fingers. An answering pulse leapt to life beneath the thin fabric of his shirt—red, not black. I didn’t need to see the jewel to know it was the Eye. With his normal hand, he seized the front of my jacket, seeking to hold me in place as he prepared to feed.
I shouted my power, blue-white flames flaring round my hands and chasing away at least some of the cloying shadows. With the chill of his fingers just inches from my face, I slashed the blades with desperate fury.
He was ridiculously stronger than me. I managed to land a glancing blow, and at least I got him to let go of me, but his counterattack was swift and terrible. I found myself quickly on the defensive, and it was all I could to do keep him from laying his deadly hands on me.
“The last time you were here, you fought with equal fervor,” he sneered, “but you know how well that ended.” Landing a flurry of punches, he added, “Hand over the Stylus and reveal the jars. Make things easy on yourself.”
“You have a fucked-up definition of easy,” I snarled, fending off blow after blow.
“Tell me and I shall kill you quickly,” he offered. “I’ll rip it from you either way.” Then he moved methodically forward, and I realized he was herding me—the lashed-down pile of crates was perhaps ten feet behind me.
I’d strayed pretty far in my struggles with the cacodaimons. Where before the crates had provided cover, now they were an obstacle against which he could pin me. I didn’t like that idea. I intoned the resonate syllables of my name till the twin blades of power gleamed bright as magnesium.
Spitting curses in a language still strange to me, I dove forward, slashing viciously, but he sidestepped every blow.
“You have no hope to free them,” he taunted. “Only I know the phrases that serve as lock and key. You’ll never get them from me.”
I drove my blades at him, but I was losing. Badly. The light that glimmered around the spirit-daggers sputtered, growing dim. I couldn’t keep this up.
“Once I’ve emptied you, I’ll bind the tatters of your soul with your lady,” he threatened, patting a bulge in the pocket of his vest. “I had her screaming near the end.”
He pressed forward, his tainted fingers grazing my cheek. They stung with the same numbing cold of a cacodaimon’s claws. He cackled wildly at my pained reaction.
“Last chance for a quick death, Anakim.”
“My name,” I bellowed with all the strength I had left, “is Zaquiel!”
I used the power of that Name to carry me forward in one last and desperate assault. I managed to connect this time, slamming my blades into his chest, but it seemed like all it did was knock the wind out of him. At least he stumbled backward. We grappled, but somehow I ended up on the losing end, pinned on the deck beneath him within sight of the crates. I wrestled weakly, working to get his back to them.
“You know what would be great about now?” I shouted desperately. “A little help here. Remy? Lil? Sal?”
The shadow-tainted Nephilim sneered nastily, exposing yellowed fangs. “Not so valiant now, are we?” He shifted his weight, pinning my legs with his knee even as I struggled to bring them up, kicking. Usually someone my size had height and reach to his advantage, but not against Dorimiel. He was close to a foot taller than me.
“You’ve earned your suffering,” he promised. “You and all your tribe. I can bring an end to your atrocities. With my new and hungry brothers, we will feed you to the void.”
His eyes bled briefly from green to black, and it was like staring into the pitiless vacuum of space. I fought to grab his wrists and at least keep his hands away, but between his superior strength and my growing exhaustion it was a token effort at best.
“Shut up and get it over with,” I cried. My strength was spent.
His sneer broadened and he wrapped his hand around my throat. The black film on his eyes cleared, and they flared poison green again.
I thought—ridiculously—that the color reminded me of pistachio ice cream. I cackled hysterically… then I felt his power burning coldly around his fingertips. Those inky tendrils took physical shape and slithered against my skin.
My laughter turned to screams.
The Eye pulsed above me, its power twining through the veins of darkness that ridged his arm. The pain quickly eclipsed all conscious thought, and I became a mute and unwilling witness to a parade of memories flashing with rapid-fire speed through my mind. Things I didn’t even realize I still remembered—pictures from childhood, images of the museum, a weathered, ancient statue which, in that moment, I knew to be the true face of the Rephaim Terael.
That blinding power riffled through the files of my mind, upending everything. Each page or photograph flashed once, brilliantly, before crumbling to ash. Dorimiel drove images of the jars at me, returning again and again to memories that were linked with them.
The third line of the cipher flashed past—
Gandhi guards my brothers.
—but nothing useful followed it. The Nephilim’s frustration shook the very pillars of my mind. Maybe it lasted only a minute. Maybe the space of a few heartbeats, but it was long enough.
Too long.
I made myself hoarse with screaming.
Then suddenly, it halted. My vision—red and ragged around the edges—returned to the here-and-now. I saw the Nephilim above me, and fumbled for his name. Then behind him, another face. Fiercely beautiful. Russet hair spilling everywhere. And two eyes like thunder.
“I knew I could count on you for a distraction,” Lil said.
Then she slit his throat all the way down to the bone.
49
Dorimiel’s blood fountained over me—and with it, a backwash of memory. I choked on it even as snapshots of recollection popped like flashbulbs in my mind. They flew by in a rush, nothing in order, all too rapid to clearly identify. I lay there stunned for a moment, astounded simply by the fact that I could think.
Above me, Lil grappled with Dorimiel. The dancing flames that burned across the deck cast weird shadows on both of them, though maybe that was my still hazy vision. I wasn’t a drooling idiot by any means, but it still felt like someone had introduced a blender to my brain.
Incredibly, Dorimiel still put up a fight. It was ghastly, especially from this perspective, because his neck had a wide and gaping smile which opened like a second mouth every time he struggled against Lil. He scrabbled with one hand, working to hold the edges of the wound shut. As he did so, I could see the lips of the laceration knitting.
Lil clung to his back like a red-haired fury, the ice pick clenched between her teeth. She kept trying to get him into a hold so she could apply it properly. I wondered if thrusting it into the base of Dorimiel’s brain would make a corpse of the shadow-tainted monster.
I didn’t get a chance to find out. The minute he realized he might actually be losing, the decimus twisted nimbly out of Lil’s grip, leaving her startled and still holding his singed and bloody tactical vest. Then he did something neither of us could have expected of a Nephilim.
He stepped through to the Shadowside.
“Bleeding Mother!” she swore.
“Lailah,” I croaked, gesturing at the vest. “Upper right pocket.”
Fury and relief vied upon her features as she retrieved the vessel holding Lailah’s bound spirit—but it counted for nothing without the sigil’s key.
I levered myself to my feet, feeling something slide heavily off the front of my jacket. It clattered onto the deck and I stared at it blankly for several heartbeats, hardly able to process what I was seeing. An amulet of thick and blood-smeared gold winked up at me, the leather thong that had fixed it round Dorimiel’s neck sliced as cleanly as his throat.
The Eye of Nefer-Ka.
A chance. I had a chance to find the key that would release Lailah and my brothers—maybe even take back all that had been taken from me. I snatched up the icon. Lil’s eyes widened the instant she saw it. She reached to take it from me.
“Sorry,” I mouthed. Drawing on some reserve of strength I didn’t even know I possessed, I turned from her—and plunged after Dorimiel through the other side of reality. I could hear her cursing behind me.
I regretted it almost immediately. This part of the ship wasn’t solid at all. I nearly slipped through the spongy deck into a dark and yawning void.
“Shit shit shit,” I gasped, struggling to get airborne. My wings still ached from the battle with the cacodaimon, but they held. I marveled at the sensation, spreading them wide and soaring on an updraft.
Struggling to orient myself, I gripped the Eye in one hand. The heavy gold amulet throbbed against my palm in time to a heartbeat—but not my own. I wracked my aggrieved brain for everything I had learned about the artifact. It devoured knowledge and power—I’d experienced that first-hand. It had been crafted by the primus of the Nephilim, but anyone could tap into it. Both Terael and Saliriel had mentioned that there would be a price, though.
A blood price.
Even as I thought it, the central tail of the Eye of Nefer-Ka shifted in my hand. The narrow, wedge-shaped gold of the amulet wasn’t firmly attached. I tugged on it, following instinct, and the tail revealed itself to be a sheath. A small sliver of bright metal glinted in the twilight of the Shadowside. A hidden blade.
I hesitated for a moment, then slashed across my open palm. Blood welled up, a shocking shade of crimson in the gray of this shadowed realm. I pressed the amulet to the wound, slipping the sheath back on the blade.
The red stone central to the Eye flared and, for a moment, my entire arm went numb. The pulse of the icon abruptly ceased. I held my breath, coasting on the currents above the Shadowside wreck of the Scylla. Needling points of sensation blossomed around the edges of the wound, as if the back of the amulet had sprouted teeth, and they were biting hungrily into me.
With a sudden wave of heat that washed all the way up to my elbow, the throbbing beat started up again, this time tuned to the rhythm of my own racing heart. Sensation returned to my hand by degrees, and with it a sense of strange whispers in the back of my mind.
I didn’t like that part at all.
But there wasn’t much to lose.
I clenched my hand around the Eye, and searched the shifting darkness for my quarry. A roiling figure of crimson mist, shot through with ebon veins, scudded above the hungry waves—the blood-soul of the Nephilim. Once I spotted him, he was hard to miss.
Just as using the Eye on a cacodaimon had infected him with its twisted darkness, no doubt it was my life and memories that had given him the ability to cross over—but that didn’t mean he belonged on the Shadowside. I was the native here, and with luck that gave me the advantage. I needed it, because I was battered, weary, and what I was about to attempt seemed a little insane.
Maybe more than a little. “Here goes nothing,” I muttered to myself, tucking my wings for the dive.
I crashed into Dorimiel at what felt like ninety miles an hour. For an instant, I was worried I would just ghost right through him, but the whirling scarlet cloud had both substance and weight. He reacted immediately, countless eyes snapping open across the twisting expanse of him. Each of them retained that same pale green iris so remarkable in the flesh. They glared at me menacingly, then pseudopods of black and red veins whipped out from the main mass, twining around me.
We twisted in mid-air, wrestling. I could feel him scrabbling at my mind, trying to draw power, but I had the Eye now. As we tangled, I thrust my hand forward, and used it.
My hand passed into the central mass of him and I could feel his essence down to the last syllable of his Name. Images blossomed in my mind. We whirled together over the void-like waters. At the same time, I was pulled into a labyrinth all twisted over with black, throbbing vines. Some of the walls were crumbling, and whole sections were choked with cloying shadows.
I was inside the construct of his mind.
C
hoosing the first corridor, I barreled down it, and everywhere I turned there rose chiseled faces. Beneath the faces, there were names—but not the ones I’d come here seeking.
Pressing deeper, I avoided contact with the walls. Those writhing black veins were a sickness, and I wanted no part of them. They chewed at the substance of the labyrinth—the cacodaimon taint was even now unmaking him. He’d been unraveling in body and mind the instant he’d had the audacity to thrust the Eye at one of those horrors and try to make it a part of himself.
At the thought, I saw the memory. A party onboard the Scylla. Late summer? Hard to tell. Someone on deck complaining of feeling sick. Peering across the Shadowside to see the dark shape hovering over her, slowly worming its way into her drug-addled brain. Grappling with the horror, exulting in the ability to seize a spirit with the swallowed skills of collective Anakim. Drunk on stolen power—intent on stealing more.
I shied away from the rest of that memory. I didn’t want to know what it felt like to taste the absence of reason that was the Unmakers.
We continued to spin in the empty air above the dark waters, fighting mind-to-mind as the images flashed by with the speed of thought. Not fast enough, though. We were still in the Shadowside.
Borrowed time.
“Where’s the key for Lailah?” I bellowed through his mind. “How do I release the ones you’ve bound?”
Voices gibbered—and they were all Dorimiel, underscored by a surging wave of insectile chittering that rose and fell like the cycling of cicadas. I heard expletives, imperatives, whispered names.
I clung to one that I sought—Anakesiel.
Turning a corner. I encountered a door. Huge and graven, the lines of his face emerged from the stone, carved on a cyclopean scale. I seized the handle, dragging it open. Memories spilled forth as vividly as if I’d lived them myself. I staggered beneath the flood, striving to control the rush of information. There was too much.
Hunted. We’re being hunted. In a carriage riding through the Alps. Someone across from him—Tashiel—I knew the name instantly. Tash recounted an attack. A group of Nephilim. It was 1833.
Conspiracy of Angels Page 27
