Winterfall

by John Conroe

  The young girl shoved a handful of the things that Mack thought might be seeds into Jetta’s hands, holding back a few that she popped into her mouth and chewed vigorously.

  She ran over to Declan and tried to pull Stacia’s hands away, but couldn’t begin to budge them.

  “Warrior, she needs to apply the seeds to his wound,” Ari said, bowing low to Stacia as she spoke.

  “Let’s try it,” Declan said and with some reluctance, his werewolf released her bloody grip.

  Instantly, Aylin bent over the wound and spat a wad of chewed seeds and saliva into the middle of the bloody mess, slapping her own hands over the wound. Declan straightened, his expression of pain freezing then relaxing. Aylin pulled her hands away and the blood flow slowed. The red was broken by an oily black liquid that flowed out and pooled on the floor with the fresh blood.

  “That is the remains of the weapon,” Aylin said, wiping her hands on her own shirt, then pulling her bag of herbs from her belt pouch. She put together a mix of dried leaves while her mother tore a piece of cloth from the hem of her shirt. Aylin put the leaves over the wound, her mother binding them in place with the makeshift bandage.

  Declan sighed, sweat running down his temple, but his face was relaxed with relief.

  “We gotta get to the portal stones, Declan,” Stacia said, coming back from the bathroom with a bunch of towels, “and burn this blood.”

  “And you gotta eat something,” he said. The others crowded round as Stacia wiped up the pool of blood, then wiped at her own hands.

  “I made up another portal in the bigger garden,” Declan explained to Mack and Jetta. Ashley came running into the room with a tray of food, shoving it onto the table near Stacia. “Eat,” she said. “Everyone else, grab your shit and let’s get ready to get the hell outta here.”

  Mack headed to the room in which he had stored his gear, ignoring most of his clothes and focusing on ammo for his guns.

  When he got back to the central rooms, Declan had the bloody towels burning up in a fierce little fire in the open dirt of the smaller garden. Stacia handed him a jug and juice splashed down his friend’s face as he chugged a deep drink.

  The others were coming back, slinging packs or reloading weapons.

  “Okay, come on,” the young witch said, heaving himself upright and moving to the large internal garden.

  The internal atrium garden reminded Mack of a Pompeii exhibit he’d once seen. It was one of those traveling museum exhibits that had set up shop for a month in Burlington, and part of the display had focused on life in Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius exploded. He’d been impressed by the central garden area in each home, and the central part of Ashley’s apartments was very similar, although hers was larger. Much of the space was paved with flagstone pathways with plots of garden space in between and a small fountain spraying water right in the exact middle.

  Declan led them to a plot that had nothing growing in it, and Mack could see the circle and glyphs that were etched into the dirt and filled with what looked like white ash.

  “Okay, here we go. Just gotta power it up and we can jump back to the portal stones,” Declan said.

  Motion at the far end of the garden caught all their eyes. Space seemed to twist itself around in a vortex and dark and light colors mixed and spun, then straightened and became Morrigan, Neeve, and the troll. The three caught sight of them, Morrigan smiling a nasty grin that promised pain.

  The open sky darkened, a wicked wind blew across them all, and a giant form back-winged to land on the roof, huge talons grabbing and tearing white stone. If the sudden appearance of Trygon wasn’t enough of a shock, the side door to the apartment blew off its hinges and the green-clad forms of Queen Zinnia, Princess Eirwen, and half a dozen guards flowed through to take up position across the garden from Morrigan’s group, with the giant dragon flapping his wings between and above them.

  “Well, that sucks,” Declan said, his tone resigned.

  Chapter 26

  Chris

  China, Earth.

  The first two came at us as a pair, charging out of the jungle almost as Ryanne finished speaking. Four guards died as I was still Moving to meet the new monsters. Bullets fired ineffectively, mostly missing but bouncing off when they managed to find their targets. Then I was between them, alternating blows from one to the other. My first shot was my best, a hammer fist that dented in the head of the closest one, stunning it long enough for me to fire three fast strikes to its companion’s body.

  Kinda silly really, because they healed as fast as I did and none of us did any real damage, although their sharp edges cut and bled me over and over.

  I pulled back to reassess and Tami yelled to me. “Chris, here,” I heard. Turning her way, I found three quarters flying at me. My hand shot out on its own and caught them. “Try that plasma jet thing,” she yelled.

  What the hell. I tossed the coins up and clapped my hands. The quarters became jets of molten copper and nickel that blasted into Thing One, punching neat dime-sized holes in its armor. I followed it with a spear hand into one of the spots, tearing the hole bigger.

  “Grenade,” I yelled. Deckert threw me a cylinder. I pulled the pin and shoved it in while the monster in front of me hit me hard enough in the head to spin me around.

  Shaking my head, my vision showed four blurry figures, which I knew was two too many. I opened my arms and dove at the left-hand pair. My momentum stopped cold as the mass of the thing shocked me, but then I Posted and hip threw it to the ground. My coins were gone but Grim had decided to try something that had worked once before: slapping both hands, each lined with aura, together hard over Thing Two’s head, in exactly the same way that I shot the coins.

  Thing Two’s head exploded into the ground, cratering a hole two feet deep. The rest of its body was still somehow attached to the shattered head, and that must have confused the nanos’ repair and fight-or-split-and-morph decision, because the body just twitched about on the ground.

  “Incoming,” Omega said and I jumped back ten feet. Two drones shot over the ground, one standard model and the other something new. Looking like some kind of guided cruise missile, the unknown drone was three feet long and cylindrical. Twin probe-looking rods extended two feet straight out of the front of the flying robot and at least eight mini-propellers floated it off the ground. It closed in on the twitching zomboid monster and a bluish fluid poured from the front of the drone, somehow running down between the two probes to coat the monster’s body. The standard drone then powered up its particle gun and fired off a burst, the body instantly consumed by white-hot flame.

  “Liquid oxygen greatly enhances the oxidation process, and its paramagnetic properties let me direct its application with a high degree of accuracy,” Omega said.

  “How long you been working on that?” I asked. Deckert moved up beside me to watch the fire. The oxygen drone moved over to Thing One and applied some liquid fuel to the burning thermite. Almost instantly, there was a sharp bang and a shock wave hit us. “Unanticipated detonation can be a side effect.”

  “Really?” Deckert said, then waved a flame thrower team forward. Erika threw up a hand and the team stopped like their feet were frozen to the ground. “There are four more inbound,” she said to Deckert, and me then winked at the young soldiers.

  “Hit ‘em from there, Jacobs, then fall back,” Deckert said. Jacobs sprayed liquid fire over the already burning monsters, as our motto was burn, re-burn, then burn again.

  I shook out my arms, hoping Grim had something left for four of the big bastards. The ground shook, making me think this was going to be a whole lot less fun.

  Just as the four big black forms burst from the foliage, I realized the shaking was coming from behind me. Two thousand pounds of were-bear shot past me and knocked the first alien seventy feet through the air like it was made of styrofoam. Then ‘Sos reared up and slammed both paws together on the second alien, smashing its body into an elongated black mess. Something was o
dd about his paws and as I looked closer, I could see that my entire bear had changed. He was taller and leaner, stretching over fifteen feet tall, his limbs longer, paws wider and more leathery looking. His jaws were stretched into something slightly less bear and slightly more wolf.

  “Our baby has found a third form,” a lovely voice said just as a wave of jasmine and lilac hit my nose.

  “You’re up early,” I said to my vampire, watching as ‘Sos tossed aliens around in his new combat form.

  “I sensed your fatigue. You’ve had a busy shift,” she said, unlimbering her tungsten carbide swords. “Take a breather.”

  “If you say so, although might I suggest you bring a thermite grenade or two with you?” I said.

  She raised one eyebrow at the same time Deckert held out a bandoleer holding four gray and purple cylinders. “I like to make a little hole and tuck them inside,” I suggested.

  She thought about that for a moment, then disappeared in a rush of air. Appearing behind an alien that was climbing to its feet, she leaned forward and sang. I think it was a single note, but don’t ask me to name it. Key of death maybe? Mostly I was just thankful it was directed away from all of us. The thing’s head blew open like clay, still clinging together but no longer recognizable as a head. She promptly dropped a grenade down the thing’s neck and took a casual step back.

  “Elegant,” Deckert said to me, clearly implying that my approach was crude and primitive.

  "Well, I did give her the idea,” I said.

  Awasos smashed another one toward her and she grabbed it out of mid-air, slamming it down onto her first victim, who was on the ground and burning fiercely. “On your left,” Omega said. Tanya skipped sideways and the liquid oxygen drone slipped up and poured frozen oxygen over the second one. It caught flame from the first and went up like a house afire.

  “Efficient. She’s conserving grenades,” Deckert said.

  “They’re working as team, ya know. The big furry one is making it easy for her,” I said, arms crossed. “Plus the drones only just got here.”

  A third zombie flew across the clearing, this time toward us, but she was there before I could think to move, chopping it in half with one sword while removing its head with the other. Before any body parts could take off on their own, she shoved them together in a pile and stepped out of Omega’s drones’ path.

  “Wow, she makes that look easy,” Ryanne said. All four witches were standing alongside us by this time.

  “Yeah, really nice form,” Tami said.

  I sighed, gave in, and started a slow clap. My vampire grinned my way and threw out a comment while waiting for Awasos’s last victim. “We discovered last night that if you keep the parts piled around each other, it confuses them. I think they don’t know whether to split or try and regrow,” she said. “Seems to work with these big ones too.”

  “No one told me that,” I said.

  Deckert handed me a single piece of paper. At the top it said Notes from the night shift.

  “Printer ran out of ink. Just got it fixed a few minutes ago,” he said.

  Running a hand through my hair, I decided I was done for the day. “Right. I’m headed to bed.”

  Erika opened her mouth to say something which, based on her arched eyebrow, was not going to be received well by Tanya, but Tami thumped her in the stomach with an elbow.

  I turned to go and a rush of scented air caught me. “What? No kiss good day?” my vampire asked.

  Just as I kissed her, Ryanne drew in a sharp, deep breath. Damn. Nothing good ever came from one of those. She was looking at her tuning fork.

  “I got more,” she said, face going white.

  “How many?” Tanya asked.

  “Sixteen, no wait,” she said, hitting the fork on her elbow. This time, we all heard the tone warble over twenty times.

  “This may be why I have not yet encountered any of the big aliens on the TRAPPIST planet,” Omega said. “They’re all here.”

  Chapter 27

  Idiria, Fairie

  For five seconds, the only sound was the patter of dust and stone falling from where Trygon’s claws tore the white stone of the rooftop. Mack barely dared to breathe, holding his SOCOM rifle tightly. Then the massive yellow-black dragon lifted his head and roared.

  Declan’s face was very pale and even the uber-confident Stacia looked worried. It was Ashley who seemed the most cool. She had her arms crossed, wearing an angry expression as she stared directly at the dragon.

  “You wouldn’t help!” she yelled. “So we did it ourselves, and I was right! It was a setup.”

  The dragon pulled back, somehow managing to look affronted by her tone. Then the massive head swiveled to look at Queen Morrigan.

  The icy queen of winter inspected one hand, glaring at her nails. She looked up at the beast and shrugged. “They didn’t end up where they were supposed to. That wasn’t my fault,” she said, looking from the dragon to her summer sister across the garden, one eyebrow raised.

  The dragon turned his head and took in the warriors and royalty of the Summer Realm.

  Zinnia crossed her arms and looked calmly back. “The portal was perfect. If it went wrong, it’s the coordinates that were wrong.”

  “You’re all involved?” Ashley asked, expression half horror, half outrage. Her father’s face had settled into a hard expression and Stacia’s eyes were starting to turn yellow. But Declan, well, Mack had never seen that particular look on his friend’s face before—never.

  Declan’s surprise was fading, replaced by a unique combination of deadly anger and something else that took Mack a second to identify… resignation. Clearly his friend had come to an unhappy conclusion, but Mack couldn’t for the life of him figure out what in this entire clusterfuck that Declan could be resigned to. Scared of, yes, but resigned to? Nothing at all came to mind.

  The two queens and the dragon turned back to the Speaker and her party, the women expectant, but the dragon, whose eyes shone with that unexpected intelligence, somehow managed to duplicate part of Declan’s look of resolve on its own giant scaly face.

  “Oh? You object to my involvement? You, the dragon that’s supposed to guard me and protect me?” Ashley demanded, carrying on a one-sided conversation. The dragon didn’t so much as blink, but Ashley sucked in a breath. She turned to the rest of them.

  “It’s all three of them. Trygon doesn’t want the dragons to trade with the elven realms, and the queens wanted to hold leverage over me in the negotiations,” she said.

  Stacia was nodding, not looking terribly surprised, and Mack caught her eye. She shrugged. “Politics. Complicated shit. It’s why I don’t do Pack stuff beyond the bare minimum. Those three are all looking to screw each other over, but unified in their desire to screw the rest of us.”

  “Crude. Essentially correct, though,” Zinnia said. “The question is… what do we do now?”

  “Easy answer, sister dearest. We kill the witch, the bitch, and the brats,” Morrigan answered. “Hold the sire as indemnity against her good behavior and get this mess done.”

  “Nope. None of the above,” Declan said, tearing his gaze away from the scary trio to look at Stacia. Mack glanced her way in time to see her nod. When he looked back at Declan, his friend had dropped to one knee and had both palms flat on the cold white stone of Idiria. “I accept. You are mine – I am yours,” he said.

  A wave of something blasted through the air, the ground, and even into Mack himself, shaking him right down to his bones. It shook the building; no, scratch that—it shook the city. Declan looked possessed. His eyes were rolled back in his head, tendons and veins popping on his neck and forearms, teeth clenched in something like pain.