Weaving, stumbling, I tried to walk and ended up crawling along the roof of the container. If I could get to the bottom edge of the cargo tray, then I could take out the other back tire and force it to drag its ass along the road. My heart was pumping hard enough that light flashed in my mouth with every heartbeat. I staggered up during a steady moment and ran for the end.
Something hit me just below the shoulder and began to thrash back and forth, levering a thin blade between my ribs. With a roar of pain, I groped back for it, pulled it out, and crushed it in my hand. It was a shrike, a bird, its skull stripped down to bone and shards of crystal. Its beak had become a razor glass weapon. I wrung its neck and threw it off the truck, coughing, and staggered to one knee as something else hit me low and then swarmed up my body like a tree. A squirrel the size of a terrier screeched and lunged for my throat, Yen spines bristling like porcupine quills. The missing Pathfinders.
I jammed the gun between it and me and emptied the clip into its chest and head. The bullets did nothing except drive it back. It rolled to its feet, tail flicking as more spines ejected from the new holes, and charged at me with mouth agape. I threw the empty gun and pulled the knife, slashing as it jumped. The former Pathfinder was more agile than physics should have allowed for: it twisted in midair and landed on my chest, claws ripping at my shirt. I stabbed it through the back multiple times before it began to weaken, and tore it free by the neck. I was still stabbing it when a second squirrel bit a large chunk out of my calf and collapsed me to the ground.
“Fucking squirrels!” The one on the knife was gasping in its death throes, black blood frothing from its mouth. I used it to backhand the other one still worrying my leg like a dog. I stabbed it two more times and flung it away, reaching down to grab the other one by the tail and haul it away from my leg.
And then, the spell cut. The small animal was suddenly a lot stronger, a lot faster, and it was on me in an instant. This one was missing its eyes and most of its fur, an animal made of broken crystal, huge teeth, and bubbling, tortured flesh. I rolled onto it, pinning it with my forearm and frantically stabbing it as it continued to kick, bite and claw.
The truck swayed and then spun to a stop, nearly tipping the container full of children off the tray and onto the road. The squirrel and I were flung off the side. I had two seconds of dizzy inertia before the crunch.
Years of combat training saved my life, but not my shoulder. I hit the ground rolling and tumbled ass over head before halting, the squirrel still impaled on my knife. I slammed its head on the ground until it stopped moving and picked myself up, trying to orientate on what was happening. There was a blockade of black cars ahead of us down the road, but no flashing lights or sirens. Confused, ears ringing, I staggered to my feet and found I couldn’t put any weight on one of them.
I saw a motorcycle pull up along the door: Jenner and Ron. She was perched on the back of the Harley like an acrobat, a bottle of something in her hand. I thought it was a Molotov until she threw it, unlit. A thin arc of liquid flew out behind it before it splashed. There was a roar of agony from the cab of the truck, and then the driver’s side door blew open. Mason leaped to the ground, a wave of warped muscle and dirty white fur, and bellowed to the night sky before fixing on me, now trying to limp away as fast as my one good foot could take me.
The escort cars were stopped, and one of them was on fire. All but two of the motorcycles were headed towards the roadblock, and I smelled a trap on instinct alone as I backed up from Mason, who was stalking me, eyeless sockets fixed on my position. I’d barely taken five steps before the front line of riders collapsed in a straight horizontal line. The lead riders were decapitated at the neck. The ones behind them either crashed into the one in front, or swerved into a skid to avoid the wire strung between trees on either side of the parkway.
Big Ron and Jenner pulled around up ahead and charged back from behind Mason. As they shot past us Mason reared up to slap as Jenner leapt off the back with a wordless cry, shifting in midair. She landed on Mason with her forearms spread, claws out, a wrap-around bear hug that began their bloody close quarters fight. The orange tiger slammed Mason into the truck and threw him to the ground, where they tangled into a snarling, spitting, slashing heap.
Men had unloaded from the black cars ahead of us, guns in their hands. With no regard for the few oncoming civilian cars trying to weave through the mess, they opened up on the remaining Twin Tigers like a firing squad.
We were dead. The cops were guaranteed to show up now, but they wouldn’t be here in time and they wouldn’t have enough initial firepower. I staggered behind the truck tire, crouching and shielding as stray rounds flew by and struck the truck, the shipping container, and the two tigers trying to rip each other to pieces. Ron had kept on going, turning the street corner up ahead and roaring off the way we’d came. He was going to look for Talya.
Two figures were running down the road towards us from that direction: Angkor and Zane. They were shouting, waving their arms. Hope flared back to life, and I got to my feet, drawing the Wardbreaker and a deep breath against the pain. I rounded the corner to rejoin the fray and got knocked upside the jaw with something hard and heavy that pitched me to the ground. The Wardbreaker skittered away from my hand.
A weird chemical taste filled my mouth. I rolled over, groaning, and squinted up at the calm face of John Spotted Elk.
Chapter 39
The reedy old man, false paragon Elder of the Four Fires, wore a black turtleneck and a shoulder holster. His hair was tied back. He was pointing the muzzle of the Wardbreaker at my head with an uncertain hand.
“Alexi Sokolsky,” he said. His face was graven and deeply lined with fatigue. “The Deacon warned me about you. I tried to put a stop to this nonsense. I tried being nice. I tried to get Ayashe to take you in. I respected you, because I know what it’s like to live in Russia during times of crisis. I did it once, long ago. Now look at this mess you’ve gotten yourself into. No one had to die like this.”
“Times of crisis? You mean during the chush’ sobach’ya?” I said. “The Revolution? Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Of course,” he replied, stiffly.
I laughed, for the first time in months and months. I couldn’t help it. His face became more and more graven.
“During the chush’ sobach’ya? ‘The Bullshit’? Really?” Once the laughter started, I couldn’t stop. “Bozhe miy, everything about you is a lie. You can’t even hold a gun straight.”
He looked down his nose at me, nostrils flaring with rage, and said nothing in reply.
“Pseudologica Fantasia,” I said. “Pathological lying. You weren’t in the Navy. You weren’t anything. The only thing you are is a good liar, and that just makes you a piece of shit. You’ve never even killed someone yourself.”
“I’m about to,” he said.
“Preserving your fantasy life was worth the lives of how many children, exactly?” I crawled back a bit, the knife in hand. “Twenty? A hundred?”
“They have to learn all of this sooner or later,” Spotted Elk replied, shifting his finger on the trigger. “When you’re as old as I am-”
I rolled my eyes. It hurt, but it was worth it.
“-and you see all the things HuMankind is willing to do to itself, you realize that none of it matters anyway.” His voice firmed, trembling with gathering anger. “I was in the trenches in World War One, I was in the Inquisition and I was hunted by them. No one ever noticed me watching them. After the first hundred cycles, I stopped pretending I was human. They’ll be reborn no matter what happens. Death is a lesson we all have to learn.”
While he was lecturing me, Jenner and Mason’s fight raged. They were chasing each other towards the side of the road, limping with ragged, gaping bloody wounds that weren’t healing. Beyond them, it was a bloodbath. Bikers were using the emptied escort cars for cover against the gunmen firing on them. Neither side were properly trained or properly armed. Three of the blac
k cars were somehow on fire.
“What a load of bullshit. Rape and murder aren’t lessons appropriate for children,” I replied, focusing back on Spotted Elk. “You never cared about them. You knew what Lily and Dru were doing, and you didn’t stop it. You’re not even a shapeshifter.”
“I am the oldest and strongest Elder in this country!” he spat.
I flared my eyes and leaned forward. “Do it, then. Transform and eat me. Go on.”
His face contorted with anger. “I don’t have to prove anything to the likes of you.”
I curled my lip. “You. Can’t. Change.”
John scoffed, but he was sweating. It was pouring down his face, running off his nose. “You think you’re a killer. You think you’re all that. You’re just a loser. Everyone knows what I am, what I did for this community and for the tribes. I’ll tell them that I was kidnapped. They’ll believe me, and you’ll be dead.”
“Then fucking do it, suka!” I struggled up higher. Zane and Angkor were surely almost within firing range.
His finger trembled on the trigger. “You don’t want to be alive when the world is the way it is. It’s all wrong.”
“DO IT!” I roared.
John Spotted Elk was panting. He cupped the butt of the pistol, but he couldn’t control the weapon and he was confused as to why he couldn’t press the trigger. I knew it. He’d never shot a damn thing in his life.
The sweat dripping from his nose froze in mid-air, hanging like a tiny crystal. I couldn’t move… or that I could, but only with extraordinary slowness. My heart thundered in my ears. The blood bubbling in my chest and throat popped and gurgled in stop motion. Only my mind remained at normal speed.
From the direction, a figure strode forward. My eyes couldn’t track him fast enough: he phased in and out on his way to us up the road, past the truck, and around. His robe boiled shadow behind him. It was wet with blood, stirring like the hood of a jellyfish underwater. Only the mask was a constant: bone white, streaked with grime. The only features were three cruel, black slits.
“All this blood and misery,” The Deacon said. He looked down at me. “What a terrible tragedy, Alexi. It’s almost as if nothing cares about life, and living.”
I tried to speak, but my jaw wouldn’t move to form words. The Deacon took something out of his robe. At first, I thought it was a weird knife – another StainedGlass weapon, maybe – but I had all the time in the world to observe the yellowish, serrated arrowhead-like thing as he turned it around in his hand, and plunged it into John Spotted Elk’s back. He put both hands against it, ramming it in deep as the other man’s face slowly morphed from fear to agony.
“So now we’re here, you should listen to what I have to say.” The Deacon continued to work the weapon into John’s body, levering it into his frozen form. “You did everything I foresaw, and for that, I thank you. We are one step closer to the final showdown with a great evil… and you played your part to the end. The very end.”
How the hell was he holding a field like this? I fought to bring the knife around, but it was like trying to move through resin.
“For the service you have done, I’m going to show you mercy. Uncommon mercy. It’s something very few people deserve.” The Deacon reached out, and took the Wardbreaker from John’s hand as his fingers loosened on it and his skin began to streak through with thick violet veins, bulging and creeping under the skin of his throat and face. “Unlike this gentleman here. He’s a liar… a man so proud that he’d rather make himself up than live. There’s a reason that pride is the greatest sin in the Bible. It’s pernicious. You start thinking you can do anything, be anyone, but it’s just not true. We’re always stuck with ourselves, alone.”
Replying was out of the question. I was still trying to get up and run.
“It’s funny how things work out. When Jana made contact with Lev Moskalysk, I told him I would have preferred to meet you instead of Vanya, but I was warned that you would violently reject what the Father has to offer mages like you and me.” The Deacon pulled his glove off and pointed the weapon down at my face, gathering a deep breath. Beads of blood appeared on the pale skin of his forearm, drawn up by the wave of arcane power I felt rising in the air around us. The liquid collected like mercury, then slid up along his hand and filled the grooves and sigils that were engraved along the barrel. Each one of them flared to life in slow motion, burning a baleful red. “It’s a shame. You do good work. I remember this gun, for example… nice toy. We used it to get into your apartment. All of those books you wrote, all those instructions you left on your Phitometry… In another life, you’d have been my apprentice. You could purge the world of the filthiness you hate.”
I wanted to retort, to say something in reply, but all I could do was observe as he dropped the muzzle down. John was open-mouthed now, eyes bulging, his hands very slowly reaching for his face as he fell to his knees.
“But you’re too proud. That’s the problem with self-taught mages. You evolve in solitude, and know that you’re better than everyone else.” The Deacon’s voice was warm, even friendly, and I was sure he was smiling behind the mask. “But even so, I admire the will to power, Alexi. You tried for a high score before you lost the game, even took out a few other players. Better luck next time.”
As I fought to react, The Deacon leveled the Wardbreaker in a steady one-handed grip, and shot me in the stomach.
Chapter 40
Getting shot in the torso doesn’t really hurt – not at first. It’s like a punch that goes right through you, a wave of pressure that tears out your back and ripples outward. And THEN it hurts.
There was no exit wound. This gut-shot tore out the front of my body: I saw the magical pattern of energy flare brightly around the Wardbreaker as the round left the chamber and flew, spinning before impact. Blood erupted from my shirt front in a slow-motion arc, lit by the Red energy of dissolution that I had crafted with my mind and hands and skill. The bullet shattered the binding that Sergei had laid on me, as well as The Deacon’s temporal field. Time snapped like an elastic band, and I screamed in real-time as the parasite’s sigil-form collapsed, legs whipping around and gathering under my skin. It pushed, squeezed itself out the entry wound like an octopus, and launched itself at The Deacon’s face.
John screamed, garbling and then retching onto the ground as The Deacon backed away, battling the freed Wrath’ree. It had lost its black color – it was now a brilliant orange mass of energy, half sea anemone, half lightning bolt. I rolled over, clutching the soil, and felt the energy of my Neshamah mesh through me. Power, sensual and thick, rolled up my spine and turned the throbbing wound into an icy void.
“Kut… kha…” I gasped aloud. Writhing, clutching at my gut as it oozed between my fingers, I looked up and saw a corona of descending black wings and burning white eyes, shimmering as if through water.
“Oh, my Ruach,” Kutkha whispered, a psychic voice like leaves whispering along the pavement at night. His voice was eager and bittersweet, heavy with sorrow. “We are reunited, but too late.”
The Deacon was fighting for his life against the Wrath’ree, pushed back towards the line of cars, and John… John was transforming. He twisted in agony, clawing at his face and mouth, and then retched a gout of blood and torn flesh onto the road as his back split like a cicada’s shell.
“You were right,” I said.
“I am not always right.” Kutkha fell around me like a blanket. “But perhaps I was, this time. Take comfort, my Ruach… dying is difficult, but death is easy. This, now, is the hardest part.”
John Spotted Elk didn’t explode so much as unfold into something that was half assassin bug, half coyote – an insectoid DOG the size of a schoolbus that drove its legs into the tarmac as it split and bubbled and divided and reformed. I stared at it, huffing through my teeth. “Will I see Vassily again?”
“It is inevitable, without intervention,” Kutkha replied, sweet and sad. “Only the NO destroys.”
The t
hing in front of me, shaking ichor from its body, was the NO. I’d kill myself before I let it take us. “I don’t Will to stay here. Help me cut the pain... I’ll fight to the end.”
“Yes.” He breathed the word like an incantation, the same gravity I had heard in Zarya’s voice. Kutkha’s presence swelled, and then the pain of my wounds receded into the far distance, sucked back by gravity. I reached out, and wrapped my hand around the knife. Slowly, I got to my feet, swaying, bleeding, but numb.
A cougar charged past me, and then a lion – an African lion, fully maned and golden furred. Right behind him was Talya’s American Lion, injured and bloody, but still moving fast. As the insect reared up, legs raised over me like an attacking spider, the three cats leapt onto it in different places: thorax, abdomen and head. The first two slid off, unable to get a grip on its slippery armor. Big Ron’s lion bit down on the bug’s armor with a crunch, only to be shaken off. The thing flung him into the door of the semi; he hit with a snarl as he bounced to the road in a sprawl, the metal dented. The bug was stupidly fast. Ron barely scrambled out of the way before its proboscis punctured the door like a sheet of paper and tore it free. Then it came after me, slamming the door down on the tarmac like a hammer.
The pain was gone. Deliriously focused, I swayed to the side and ran underneath it. I jammed the knife into the joint of its leg, and the bug screeched as it dipped down on that side. Talya leaped again, flexing her claws under the edge of an armored plate. The insect whirled, knocking me down, and I saw the lion swing as she clung on and began to rake with her back legs.
I was stumbling up again when a huge orange shape hit me like a cannon ball, bowling me out from under the insect’s body just before it dropped its bulk to crush whatever was underneath. We rolled together, and then the tiger – Jenner – sprung back up to her feet. She was heaving, her flanks soaked in blood, her chest, neck, and hind legs ripped like canvas cloth. One of her eyes was missing: the right side of her face looked like raw hamburger. She roared in defiance, and charged the bug as it rolled and twisted, stabbing at the cats and the road, tearing up asphalt and the soil beneath.
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 35
