by Nazri Noor
“No,” she said, her head swinging from her children, to the pillar, and back again. “Please, no,” she wailed, pleading to some unseen force. “I’ve only just brought them back. Time.” She staggered to her feet, clutching at the holes in her belly, loping for her corrupted brood. “Please. Give me time.”
A single black tentacle the size of a tree ripped out of the pillar of light, tearing through the veil between realities with a deafening crack.
Not this, I thought. The last thing we needed was another monstrosity to fight.
But the thing hadn’t come for us. Thea’s eyes went wide as the tentacle shot straight for her body. She screamed as it curled around her waist, dragging her towards the gateway. Her talons tore into the earth, digging great furrows as she fought to stay in our world, as she fought to be with her children once more.
“No,” she screamed. “Please. No.”
I’d never heard Thea so frightened. I’d never heard anyone so terrified. Her screams pealed through the night as the tentacle dragged her through the rift. The beam of light winked out into nothing, and just like that, Thea Morgana was gone.
But there was still the matter of her children.
Another howl tore through the graveyard, and before we could even think to coordinate, Gil had already raced across the hill, launching himself at the closest of the abominations. He was a roaring missile, jaws gnashing and frothing – but I couldn’t even begin to think where he could attack the beasts and hope to slow them down, much less stop them.
He smashed into the monster, tearing at its belly with his claws. The beast reared back, lifted its own spindly, spear-like talons, and struck. Gil yelped like a kicked dog, stumbling into the earth, his fur matted and slick. Blood dripped from the awful gashes carved across his chest.
“Fuck,” I said, raking at my hair. “Oh, fuck. Gil, oh fuck.”
Carver tugged on my shoulder. “Dustin. The artifacts.”
That’s right. I’d forgotten about them, the entire pile still littering the ground between the gravestones. But the abominations had set their eyes upon us, and were moving with an awful, unholy speed, wriggling like great worms across the grass.
Worse, they were growing. God, but I hadn’t imagined it. By some horrible twist the Eldest had given these monsters a form of cellular acceleration. It had started slowly enough, but between climbing out of the earth and attacking Gil, each of Thea’s children had nearly doubled in size. Who knew how large they could become? And if they set their sights on Valero –
“We need to stop them. They’re getting bigger, Carver.”
“That hasn’t escaped my notice. It will take most of my energy, but I should be able to trigger a detonation using the arcane power stored within the stolen artifacts. I’ll need your help in this, Dustin.”
“Okay,” I stammered, forcing myself to calm down. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”
“I’ll need you to shadowstep among the children, to distract them while I work.”
“Come again? I think I misheard you there.”
“You heard me right the first time,” he growled. “And I’ll need you to hold them in place. Use your blades, the way you would pin insects to a board.”
Or the way I’d done so with Amaterasu, and with Thea that same night. Use my blades like an iron maiden. That part? No sweat. I just needed to bleed half my body out to get the job done. The thing about distracting the beasts, though?
“Do it,” Carver snarled.
I had no choice. We were the only ones left standing, and if I had to act as the decoy, then so be it. I walked into the shadows, traversing through the Dark Room. The mists were even more excitable, as if being used twice in the same night hadn’t been enough for them.
They tumbled in the darkness, snaking tentacles and shadowy fingers over my skin, my cheeks. I might have imagined it, but it felt as if one of the tendrils reached for the wetness in my wounded palm, between my fingers, lapping at my blood.
I emerged in the graveyard, putting the pile of artifacts between myself and the pair of abominations. The smell of freshly turned earth grew thick in my lungs as I breathed. “Over here,” I shouted, whirling Vanitas over my head as I did, his garnets and tarnished gold flashing in the night.
Thea’s children howled as they caught sight of me, their human faces contorting into deranged masks of both hunger and hate, the dozens of mouths in their bodies baying for my blood. Slobbering and slithering, they wriggled towards me, towards the artifacts. Not one of them noticed when their bulbous, gelatinous bodies consumed their own gravestones as they approached.
I didn’t hesitate. I slammed my palm into the earth, driving my intention into the shadows, to bring forth enough blades and spikes and spears to hold Thea’s children in place. And this time I didn’t need to cut myself open, either.
The Dark Room did that work for me, claiming its payment through the wounds that opened across my skin, in particular the one that ripped open over my heart. I grimaced against the pain, chuckling from deep in my throat. If Asher and Carver didn’t have anything left over to heal me after this was said and done, I hoped that they’d at least have the strength to bury me.
Massive thorns of gleaming shadow tore through the earth, dozens of them conjured by my blood from the bowels of the Dark Room. The abominations shrieked as hooks and knives of solid darkness ripped into their flesh, a pit of spikes meant to seal them.
Drawing on the last of my power – and, I figured, the last of my blood – I sank into the earth, entering the Dark Room once more. With flagging strength I stumbled through its shadows, then reentered our world, falling onto my knees by Carver’s feet.
He was still chanting when I reappeared, his hands shuddering as he summoned every trace of magic still left within his body. The sound of broken glass tinkled under the hideous screams of the wounded abominations – three, four, five of Carver’s gems had fractured and cracked under the horrible weight of his spell. He thrust his hands forward, and with the roaring of a dragon a massive gout of pale fire shot through the night, hurtling directly for the pile of stolen relics. I held my breath.
The night shattered. The abominations howled. A prism of searing color exploded between the children, every artifact splintered and sundered by the might of Carver’s magic. The torrent of arcane energy reached into the sky, blasting everything around them into worthless smithereens. Fuck the Veil, man. Hell, fuck the planet. If the normals knew where to look, and who to blame, this was practically a declaration of war.
The back of my brain ached from the brilliance, and I shielded my eyes until it faded. I only dared to look when the radiance had cleared. But there was nothing left on the hill. The combined detonation of the artifacts had obliterated the abominations thoroughly, disintegrating them down to the last atom.
Carver fell to his knees, his palms pushing against the grass. I looked around us, at the devastation Thea’s final ritual had wrought. The hill had been cratered by the explosion, a perfect concave hollow carved into the earth. Diaz’s body was somewhere on its slope, but from where I knelt, I could still see him breathing. Considering what Thea had done to his family, I didn’t know whether death would have been more merciful.
Asher was still watching the hillside with his mouth hanging open, his face and neck glazed in sweat. Gil groaned, sprawled on his back across the wet grass, his chest torn open, but I knew he’d live. He just needed a half dozen raw steaks. That was all.
As for Sterling – there was no easy way to tell. At least half his body had been incinerated by sunlight, the rest of him only spared by the last minute twist he’d made to dodge Thea’s spell. I stared in silence at his scorched body, hating that I couldn’t tell if he was alive. He’d sacrificed himself to give me an opening to kill Thea.
And finally, she was dead. And yet, for the first time in a long while, I felt a swell of pity, of remorse. These creatures had been changed by the Eldest, but they were still children after all, inn
ocents yanked harshly from beyond the grave by the misguided love of a grieving mother.
I couldn’t believe it myself, but some part of me was uttering a silent, secret prayer for the Morganas. Perhaps Thea’s one, small mercy was being spared the indignity of having to watch her own children die again. That I was still capable of having that thought told me that maybe – just maybe – I still had enough of my humanity to cling to.
But there would be time to think on that later. Sirens were wailing in the distance, because as far out of Valero as the graveyard was, the destruction of the artifacts had caused an explosion loud enough to alert the entire county. I was surprised that the Lorica hadn’t shown up yet. The best part was that we had no evidence to show that this wasn’t our fault.
I licked my lips to wet them, grimacing when I tasted the blood that had dripped into the corner of my mouth. “Carver,” I croaked. “We have to go.”
He lifted his head back, panting, his eyes squeezed shut. “Fuck the Eldest. Fuck the normals, fuck the Lorica, fuck all the rest of them.” He chuckled bitterly. “The things we do to save the world.”
Carver raised his hand to the sky, chanting. Ropes of amber fire reached out to the bruised and bloodied members of the Boneyard. One of them snaked around Diaz’s unconscious body.
“Home,” Carver cried, siphoning the very last of his power.
I gripped Vanitas in both hands, sighing as the flames of the sending spell consumed us. Home. The sweetest word.
Chapter 30
The Lorica did show up, I found out later on. They beat the authorities to it, which I suppose shouldn’t have been a surprise considering how fast their teleporters could work. A few of the Wings escorted a Scion to the hilltop, who then threw up a massive glamour to disguise, if only temporarily, the fact that a fight had ever happened there.
Herald told me that it took some elementally-specialized Hands the better part of the night to dump enough earth to reshape the place, and even longer for the Lorica’s cleanup team to get rid of all the shrike and homunculus viscera. At least it worked well enough to keep the normals in the dark.
What I learned in my early days at the Lorica always lingered. How would the normals react if they knew we existed? What would they do if they realized that humans infused with the power of nuclear bombs walked among them in broad daylight?
Fortunately, at least when it came to my father, it wasn’t all that much of a deterrent. It took far less work than I expected to include him in my life again. The first order of business was to give up the crappy house he’d taken up outside town. I helped him settle into a smaller place in Valero. It wasn’t quite suburban swanky, but it felt good knowing he was closer by. I didn’t mind funneling a chunk of my earnings into supporting him while he got back on his feet.
The best part was how quickly Norman got along with my coworkers. It took a little bit of time to convince him that Gil didn’t go around sporadically turning into a rampaging werewolf, and that Asher wouldn’t accidentally raise the dead in his sleep and kill us all. But after a couple of sessions at Mama Rosa’s with a few beers, he started to see the Boneyard as I did: as colleagues, as humans, as friends.
But I didn’t tell him about mom. He didn’t have to know about how Thea had poisoned her with a box of relics. That I decided to keep to myself.
It was nice to see dad happy again, and to know that he’d resolved to control his drinking. A few light beers never hurt anyone, and I always made sure to throw him in a car or drop him off myself, just to be certain. I watched as he and Gil squabbled amicably over sports. Tonight, I thought, maybe I’ll make an exception.
We’d found a great spot out on the sand, over at Lucero Beach. It was a nice evening, with good weather, and Carver had previously mentioned the possibility of us all going out for a proper little beachside barbecue, just the boys from the Boneyard.
Asher had latched onto that offhand remark for days, watching his weather apps like a hawk, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. And so it did, so we packed up and filed out to the beach, just a lich, a necromancer, a werewolf, a shadow beast, and his dad, a whole bunch of the undead and undead-adjacent, out for a casual nighttime barbecue by the ocean. No big deal.
“Look at this thing,” Asher called out, plodding up from the surf with a starfish in his hands.
Carver raised a finger. “Put that back. And don’t swim so far out. It’s dark.”
Here’s your gentle reminder that Asher was eighteen. Sheltered, yes, but eighteen. Carver really was so overprotective of his favorite. I laughed. “It’s not going to kill him, you know.”
“Well and good, but that starfish belongs in the water. Put it back, Asher.”
“Sorry,” Asher muttered. “I got excited. Never seen one of these up close.”
He hadn’t seen a lot of things, and we needed to keep that in mind for the future. It was so odd, knowing that this surging fount of necromantic power, this supernatural double-edged blade that could both kill and create was housed in the body of an earnest and slightly awkward young man. And maybe that was for the best. I slept better at night knowing that Asher had a curious, but gentle disposition. He was just a good guy in general.
“It’s dark out, Mayhew,” Sterling shouted. “You drown and I’m not swimming out to retrieve your sorry ass.”
He exhaled a puff of cigarette smoke, somehow managing to do it angrily. Asher blubbered something indistinct but possibly very rude from among the waves. Sterling gave him the finger and laughed.
He’d survived, thanks in no small part to Asher’s effort. And it wasn’t the healing aspect of his necromantic magic that did the trick, either. Asher offered himself to Sterling as soon as Carver had teleported us from Latham’s Cross to the Boneyard. Like, actually offered himself, letting Sterling take as much of his blood as he needed to rejuvenate himself.
It wasn’t as much as I’d thought, as it turned out, but we did have to pull them apart once Sterling had regained enough of his strength. The hunger tied into how drained a vampire was, and as rare as Asher’s power was, that made his blood an even rarer delicacy, an even tastier treat in the moment, which made it harder for Sterling to stop drinking. In not so many words, Carver, Gil, and I had to apply the arcane equivalent of a crowbar to rip Sterling off of Asher’s wrist.
I thanked Sterling myself later that night, after his blood frenzy had faded. We couldn’t have defeated Thea if he hadn’t thrown himself directly at her. He shrugged it off and tried to play it cool, but I caught the beginnings of a smile in the corner of his mouth. Sterling could be an ass sometimes, but there was no way I could ever doubt his loyalty again.
Carver explained to me how we were all that Sterling had left, that immortality had ensured that anyone he liked or loved was long dead. We were his tribe, and as I saw at the graveyard on the hill, Sterling would do everything in his power to keep us safe. We were his family.
Diaz was offered room and board at the Boneyard, to at least give him time to sort out what he was going to do next. Carver said that we could always use a blood witch, but I knew him well enough to say that he extended his invitation out of empathy. Whatever else Carver had done in his long life, he was working hard to undo it. No one lost more than Diaz did the night the homunculi destroyed Nirvana, and while he was grateful for the offer, it was clear that he needed time alone. Last we heard, he’d left Valero.
“Dust.” My dad waved a beer at me, beckoning me over. “What’re you standing all alone over there for? Come here.”
Gil was already sifting through a cooler, pushed into the sand alongside an incredibly cumbersome collection of jars and plastic tubs. He and dad had bonded over their mutual love of meat. As a werewolf, Gil knew his steaks inside and out, raw or otherwise, and dad had always been the type who could appreciate a good rack of ribs. I made a mental note to invite Herald out for one of these barbecues at some point in the future, then a second note to ask him to replace the jar of rub he’d used to
cast his wards over dad’s old house.
Vanitas was plunged halfway into the sand, his place of honor by the barbecue pit. He hadn’t spoken yet, which naturally meant that he hadn’t shown signs of moving, either, but I remembered how much he liked to be around people when there was food. Somehow he could taste it, or so he claimed. It didn’t matter that his presence deafened me with his continued silence. It was just good to have him around.
“Fire’s gonna take a while to get going,” Gil said over his shoulder. “Might as well start it now.”
I stuck my hands into my hips and scoffed. “Oh, please. I’ll get it hot super fast. Just you watch.”
Gil rose to his full height, dusting off his hands and folding his arms. He fixed me with an expectant grin. “Go ahead, hotshot.”
I focused on my fingers, on my intention of setting the bundle of twigs and kindling and coal Gil had set up into a blazing fire. Hah, scratch that. I looked even further into the future. What I wanted was a nice, juicy burger, the exact damn thing that started off this ridiculous adventure in the first place. I wanted it flaming hot, better than anything that the Happy Cow could make. And I wanted it yesterday.
A spark of fire larger than I’d ever produced came bursting out of my fingertips. I bit back a yelp, and in my shock, flicked my wrist at the fire pit. The damn thing – a sphere of flame about the size of a golfball – launched from my hand and landed among the twigs. The entire mess burst into flames. A huge, roaring fire.
Dad laughed, pulling me in for a hug, then clapping me on the back. “That’s my boy. That’s my little pyromaniac.” He pointed at me, practically jeering at Gil. “Hey. Hey Ramirez. That’s my kid. That guy.”
Gil shook his head and laughed. “Fine. I guess you’re better at this than I thought.”
I shrugged, playing it off like I’d meant for the fireball to happen, simultaneously tamping down the excitement of finally creating and shooting one on my own.
