by Alana Melos
“Alistair…” I said as Rebekah turned around. She blinked and I read the surprise in her eyes.
“You’ll have to forgive my vanity,” he said as he took out gloves from the pocket of his long coat and pulled them over his twisted hands, not meeting mine nor Rebekah’s stare. He had eyes only for the doors which splintered and bent under the onslaught they suffered. He sounded embarrassed, or maybe ashamed.
“Alistair,” Rebekah said, echoing me. “I don’t--”
Whatever she was going to say was lost as the door crashed down, beaten to splinters by one of the monstrous metal men. It wielded an axe the size of me and it had to duck to get inside. The dead, putrid flesh stank and I drew my sword wondering how I was going to get close enough to it to stab it. Flashes of their earlier attacks and the decimated zombie on the pavement came to me. Would they even die? Reduced to bits of flesh and ooze, the zom-bot had still been moving. Rebekah put her goggles and mask on. I envied her as I gagged on the smell, but she had the right of it. I grabbed my mask and put it on, readying myself.
“Run,” Alistair said as another of the creatures, a small one with drills for hands, came inside his home. I glanced at him and stormclouds gathered around him. His voice was as dark as his scowl. The wind picked up, coming from Alistair as he channeled whatever magics he was going to use. “They’re not going to leave intact, but I can’t protect you.”
“We’ll protect you,” Rebekah said, her voice muffled.
The large creature lurched forward, bellowing and sending a foul wind into the room where the three of us stood. Behind the creatures I saw our hunter, the mage controlling the mechanical zombies. He was chanting still and pointing, directing the other minions around him to circle around the building more than likely to ensure no one could escape. There wasn’t that many of them, but how did you kill something that wasn’t dead? You killed its power… but we had tried to kill Richter before and been rebuffed easily.
A blast of eldritch green energy hit the large zombie, staggering it. Two more fired in quick succession, ripping holes in the dead flesh to let black blood and writhing maggots loose. When I looked back to Alistair, his gloved hands glowed with a pale, sickly green light which highlighted his scarred face making him look ghastly, as if he were on the point of death.
“If we had only known,” he said as he summoned another bolt of energy, making the beast stop in its tracks, eldritch bonds around it. He raised his arms to lift the beast magically and the smaller one surged forward. Rebekah and I scattered, her one way and I the other. My sword slashed down, cutting off one of its drill hands before it could reach us. Rebekah stepped in, dodging. It swung at her, the drill grazing her jacket as she grabbed its arm. She pulled with all of her unenhanced might and flesh came off in her hands. Shrieking, she let go of it then kicked at its knee. I heard a loud crunch as she broke its leg. My sword came down again, skipping off of the metal parts to slash it, but then we were pushed aside by Alistair’s mystical energies. He wrapped the other one up as well, and threw them both back outside of the ruin which had once been his front door.
“If we had only known of this dimension, or others that fought… that had battle magics at the ready, willing to share, willing to show us what we needed to do,” he said, his voice soft but carrying through the tempest which raged through the house. “But we didn’t.”
He said a word and lightning streaked down from the sky to strike the enemies outside, but it splashed off of a shield erected by the oberst. I stood there in awe looking at Alistair, his long coat whipping around his legs, his hair tousled by the wind. His eyes glowed with dark power, pulsing with his heartbeat.
“Learned some new things during my exile,” he said as the black tentacles around his hands and back writhed in an ethereal wind. Green flames licked up his arms, igniting his coat. “What happened to Pax will not happen here.” Looking to myself and Rebekah, he said one more word, “Run.”
We exchanged a look and did what the man said. We ran.
Chapter Fourteen
We bolted to the back of the house. I knew there was a door to the outside through the kitchen. I ran for it, the Siren hot on my heels. When I ripped open the door, it revealed one of the zombots standing there, looming as if it had been waiting just for us. It filled up my field of vision as well as the entire door frame, but it was too big to walk through. The thing jabbed through the doorway. Rebekah moved to one side, but I stood my ground. Instead of dodging, I made a shield with my teke and pushed with all my mental might. Perhaps the back stoop was slippery, or maybe it wasn’t ready for an attack. Whatever it was, the zombot slipped off the back steps and went flying through the alley to crash into the opposite building.
“Let’s go!” I said and rushed through the door.
Thunder boomed behind us and the house shook. Plaster came down from the ceiling, raining down on us like snow. I didn’t stick around to see if she followed. I ran through the door and took a sharp left, heading to the mouth of the alley. Since I still wore heels, I raised myself above the snow after the first few steps and flew low to the ground. I faintly heard muffled thuds behind me. When I glanced over my shoulder, the Nacht Sirene was there, practically jumping from drift to drift as she tried to keep upright. I reached out with my mind and lifted her, bringing her to me.
She grabbed hold of my arm once she was in range and shook me. “We have to go back!” she exclaimed, her voice all but lost in the wind. “We can’t leave him alone!”
“Are you crazy?” I asked. “We can’t get in the middle of a magic duel!”
Shaking her head, she continued, “We can take out the dead creatures, the machines.”
“All we can do--excuse me, all I can do is--” I didn’t finish as movement behind her demanded my attention. The dead thing had gotten up and plowed through the heavy snow towards us, determined to fulfill its directive. I lashed out again with my teke. In doing that, I had to drop Rebekah. She landed heavily in a snowbank with a muffled squeak. Instead of throwing it back to rally again, I held it still.
Doing that took a lot of out me as the zombot railed against the invisible bonds, its strength much greater than I had anticipated. I flew at it. With a focusing scream, I swung my sword as I flew past it, lopping the head off cleanly. It didn’t die, but I didn’t expect it to. I landed gracefully and kicked the head as far as I could, using my teke to augment my strength as I released the body. The rest of it lashed out at me. I ducked the whirring appendage and moved in front of it. With a last big exhalation of breath, I sent it flying through the alley once more. It still moved, and could still hurt us, but now it had no idea where we were.
“As I was saying,” I said, my breath frosting in the air. “All I can do is not much more. I’m going to be tapped out here if we fight in a matter of minutes. There were a lot of them. I can’t take them all down.”
“I’ll fight,” she said, sounding a bit sulky to me as she brushed snow from her clothes. “We can’t leave him.”
“You were more than willing to two minutes ago!” I snapped. “Let’s take this opportunity to go. Me? I like living. This is how you live--you know when to cut and run.”
“He won’t,” she said, tugging on my arm. “There’s too much, too many. We can circle around and attack. Richter won’t see us coming.”
I ripped my arm away from her, “Look, Alistair’s a big boy. He can take care of--”
My words were lost in an explosion which rocked the ground. Looking up, I saw shrapnel flying from what must have once been the front of the brownstone. A thread of worry started to surface in my head and I pushed it away. I didn’t want to worry about him. I didn’t want to worry about anyone but myself.
“You were saying?” she said. “Come on, let’s go! We can grab him and run if nothing else!”
Without waiting to see if I followed, she turned and tried to run through the snow. It clung to her and bogged her down so the fastest she went was a moderate walk. I rolled my ey
es and thought I should leave. The thought was right there. I wanted to grab it and run with it. I had rabbited on partners before and with no hard feelings left between us. It was business, and they understood.
This wasn’t business.
She wouldn’t understand.
I shouldn’t care.
But I did. “God dammit,” I swore under my breath. If I kept it to my sword work, I might be able last more than a few minutes and still have enough oomph to fly us out of here. Running was a no-go, not in this weather. The town had all but shut down by now and there were no cars on the roads to steal. I flew over to Rebekah and picked her up with my teke, offering her my free hand as I did. “Deal’s this--we go until I say to run,” I told her. “Because if I don’t have enough energy to fly, no one’s getting out.”
“Deal,” she said, shaking my hand. I heard her grin in her voice. “I knew you’d come with me.”
This is such a bad idea, I thought as I looked up. At least, the sun was beginning to dawn. Instead of being black as pitch, the world was now cloaked in murky grey. I flew us around the corner and winced at what we saw.
Blood red and eldritch green clashed horribly together. Sparks flew where the different magical energies touched, melting the snow around them to create a wide open slushy area. The house had been halfway blown up: the entryway and study had been destroyed and the brownstone lay gutted. There were over a dozen of the mechanized Nazi dead. Alistair had a shield up. Whenever they struck it with their hands, knives, drills, or claws, green sparks flew and energy flared in a wide arc around him, keeping them at bay. Each time, the glow seemed a little less.
“Mein gott,” Rebekah said, her voice sounding hollow behind her gas mask.
“What?” I asked, then saw. They weren’t all human. Three of the dead were werewolves. My heart rose in my throat, not just out of sympathy, but out of anger and fear. These were my brothers and sisters, as close as I’d ever get anyway. They’d adopted me and here they were, hideous mockeries of themselves. Unlike the other dead which Richter must have brought with him, these bodies were fresh, flush with blood and color. Their fur had frozen blood in it, and strips of skin clung to them, the last of their shredded human selves. What he had done to them made bile rise in my throat.
I was a sadist. I enjoyed giving pain. But this… this wasn’t anything I would have ever dreamed. I couldn’t have thought this up. It simply wasn’t in me to warp a person’s body that way, to make them into a tool. I liked giving pain because it allowed me to feel. This was just wrong.
One of them had had their entire snout removed and in its place something like a steel trap had been affixed. It snapped open and shut like a machine, as if the beast were trying to eat through the magical shield. Another had had their fingers removed, long spikes put into their place. Yet another had a pair of cannons mounted through the flesh of the chest, just under the collarbones. All of them had other modifications as well, armor plating sloppily put into place, mechanics around eyes and nose, and so on. I barely recognized them as werewolves.
Given half a chance, Richter would do the same to us, probably while we were still alive. It occurred to me this was the second time I had felt something was wrong or immoral and that alarmed me even more than those pesky feelings had. I had no morals. I had a system of ethics in place, my “rules”, but morals? Things being right or wrong? Good or evil? None of that had ever mattered to me… but now it did.
Taking a deep breath, I lowered both of us to the ground. It was covered in water, but we could walk and that was a boon. “Hit fast and hard,” I said. “We want to try and give Alistair an opening to flee. I don’t think we can take so many, not with him dealing with Richter.”
She nodded. “Hit and run I am very good at,” the Siren whispered, her voice thick.
“We’re just trying to draw them away, give him a fighting chance,” I reminded her. “We’re not heroes.”
The Siren gave me a look I couldn’t read through her goggles, then darted away. I followed, moving slower to try to judge the situation. As I followed the Nacht Sirene, I saw she didn’t move in a straight line, but tried to make herself a juicy target. The dead didn’t pay attention to her, but she soon caught the eye of Richter. His attacks on Alistair eased for a moment as he diverted his attention to her.
“Hey asshole!” she called out, loud. “I thought you wanted me!”
Though I couldn’t see him, I could well imagine the sneer on his face. “Get her,” he directed. A few of the dead broke off from their attack on our mage to lumber after her. At least they weren’t too fast.
I darted in, still unseen, and moved to the closest dead werewolf. I couldn’t stand to see them like that. The empathy born from my feelings for Rory and Adira and knowing what they would say upon seeing the horror before me made me angry. Latching onto that anger, I shoved my sword through its back. The dead werewolf whipped around so fast it ripped my o-wakizashi out of my hands. As it turned, I saw the tip of my blade sticking out the front. It swiped at me. Congratulations me, mission accomplished… I got its attention.
Out of instinct, I raised a telekinetic shield in front of me and those spiked claws went skittering off of it. I winced with it, phantom pain racing through me. My skin felt on fire. I dodged, moving back as fast as I could out of its range as my hand flew to my chest. It came away bloody. Somehow, when the claws had savaged my shield, it had savaged me as well. No more shielding then.
The wolf went for me. It wasn’t as fast as it would have been were it alive, but it was much, much faster than the other zombie-mechs. Another of the zombies peeled off at Richter’s shout and now I had two to contend with. When the back of my feet hit the snow drift I stopped, and let them come to me. I gambled the wolf would act like the wolves usually did. When it leaped for me, claws sparkling in the dawn’s light, I jumped into the air aided by my teke. At the same time I gestured for my sword, ripping it out sideways to do the most damage, and it flew to my hand as I landed. The wolf went crashing into the snow, but only for a moment. It righted itself quickly as the other dead thing lunged for me, metal sawblades whirling where its hands should have been.
I ducked and slashed. My blade skittered off the metal in its side. I glanced behind me and saw Alistair being driven to his knees, bleeding from a hundred different cuts. The look of determination on his face told all the story I needed to see. On the other side of Alistair’s shield, the Siren danced with the others which had gone to deal with her, but she couldn’t hurt them underpowered as she was. She looked up at me and I shook my head slightly. Though I couldn’t see her eyes through the goggles she wore, I saw her brow scrunch down, probably frowning. Her face turned, looking down for a moment. As I wove and dodged the two zombies on me, trying not to resort to my teke to shield me, I wondered what in the hell she was looking at.
Instead of shielding, I pushed the wolf zombie away from me and cut again at the human one. This time, I hit home and lopped its arm off, right about at the forearm. As the black blood oozed from the wound and the feasting maggots hit the ground with fat wet plops, I knew what Rebekah had been looking at. It all clicked into place and I knew what she was going to do.
“Rebekah, don’t!” I shouted, shoving the zombie aside and racing to her. Adrenalin gave me speed, but my realization had come too late.
Having shoved her sleeve back on her right arm, when the creature she’d been facing off against attacked once more, instead of dodging she held up her arm as if trying to ward it off. She wasn’t though; she wanted it to hit her. With a loud crunch of bones and bright red blood splattering in the puddles of water we stood in, her right hand went flying off. With it, the bracelet.
Without hesitation, she shadowstepped. Unlike the vampire whose power had been gifted to her, she was not impeded by daylight. There she was one moment and gone the next, only to reappear behind the creature. She punched with her good fist and the zombie’s head exploded. It didn’t go down. It wouldn’t until Richte
r was defeated or chose to let go of them, if I understood his power correctly. However, without a head it couldn’t see her anymore and it blindly reached with sharp metal hands. She ignored it and went to the next, blood pouring from her wound.
A few seconds later, I was by her side. “Let me see!” I shouted.
She showed me the stump and I sealed it telekinetically. Once she saw she wasn’t bleeding, she went back to work, awesome and terrifying to behold. Though she wasn’t a super speedster, nor a brick with super strength, both of her strength and speed were augmented. Even without shadowstepping, the Nacht Sirene whirled through the zombies in a macabre dance. She didn’t pause for a second and I imagined her mouth set in grim determination. I might have made light of her inexperience, but I was wrong. I’d watched her once before during the fight on Axis, and now… now there was nothing to hide how deadly she was, how beautiful she made each move, each step, dancing the dance of a master.
Grabbing the arm of one of the zombots, she ripped it off at the shoulder. This she threw at Richter while she punched with her stump at one of the dead wolves. It stepped right into her blow, either unable or unwilling to dodge, and she dented the metal covering its chest. When it clawed at her, its metal teeth snapping at the same time, the Siren headbutted the long snout, then legswept it. It went down in a heavy crash. I stabbed it through the eyes as she stomped on its legs, pulverizing the backwards bent knee into red mush.
To the next she moved, her feet seeming to barely touch the pavement. The long side of her hand slammed into a zombie’s chest. Ribs cracked and flesh gave way under her strength. It grabbed her, but then she shadowstepped once more, leaving only dark mist in its grasp. Reappearing on the other side of it, she slammed the stump into its neck, leaving a large gaping hole there. The blow would have killed a regular man, or even an underpowered metahuman. This thing moved still, the buzzsaw it had for a hand slamming into her jacket and skittering off the enchanted material. Her breath went out in a great big huff with the force of the blow and she stepped back. I moved behind it and decapitated it with a single hard strike. The head tumbled to the ground and rolled away from it, decayed teeth still snapping and body still jerking around, trying to kill us.
