by H. D. Gordon
Surah was as tough as one could come, but she hated insects. They terrified her, and had since she was a little girl. She was sure it had something to do with the time her brother Syris had put a handful of fireflies in the hood of her cloak and laughed when she pulled the hood over her head, pausing before running around in circles and screaming.
But no such panic could be had here. She may not be able to kill Dagon, but if she could evade his attacks long enough to cast a Banishment Spell, she could send the bastard away for a long time.
Trouble was, he hadn’t given her any such opportunity. A Banishment Spell was not like other Magic. It could not be done with a mumbled incantation and a flick of one’s wrist. It took time, patience, and enormous strength, none of which Surah had at the moment.
Suddenly, as she teleported adeptly out of Dagon’s reach once more, she realized that she’d underestimated her enemy, that she had allowed her emotions—and yes, she thought now, may as well admit that the Black Stone was playing a certain role as well—to get the best of her.
These self-doubts and dark thoughts had grabbed a hold of her, and it was only a moment, but it was enough. She’d become distracted, and that was all it took.
Dagon was on top of her before she could take another breath, the beast pinning her body flush to the ground, which had not been gentle on her tailbone when she’d struck it. He held her wrists in his claws, the sharp nails there biting painfully into her skin. His weight was enormous, crushing, allowing for only shallow, inadequate breaths. She felt his lower half shifting in the most terrible of ways, felt her cloak being ripped away, her heart beating boldly in her throat.
And for the first time in her life, Surah Stormsong was too horrified to even scream.
CHAPTER 34
SAMSON
The feeling slammed through him by way of his stomach, twisting it into knots and making it hard to breathe. Mila sat across from him, had not spoken a word to him since before the fight, since before Sam had killed her father and taken his place as King of the Beasts.
Now his betrothed came forward, studying him, and spoke for the first time. “Samson,” she said, her sweet voice filling his head. Concern had crept into her tone, and Sam was oddly moved by this. “Are you alright?”
Samson’s tongue felt thick in his throat, and he had to swallow twice before he responded. “I… I don’t know,” he answered. “Something is wrong.”
After the fight, Sam had dragged Drake’s body to the Clean River, where the Great Cats sent their dead who were too important to eat. Drake had been heavy, and the process had been long, but he’d done it because it was what was expected, and because Drake deserved the respect. The pride had followed behind, had stood witness as Sam set the former King’s body at the edge of the surging river that ran all the way through the northeastern jungles for over two hundred miles.
The waters had welcomed the dead king’s body, picking it up the way a mother scoops up her infant, with ease and familiarity. Mila had stood beside Sam then, silent as the night as she watched the waters carry her father away. Sam was sure she must hate him.
But she was a royal cat, and she’d walked dutifully beside him while he’d led the pride home and climbed atop the king’s rock in the clearing the cats occupied. Mila had stepped up and held her head high as Samson addressed the pride as their new king, as he had claimed her as his own, just as Drake had intended in case of this turn of events.
She had done these things, but Sam could not miss the bitter resentment that had touched the corners of her slanted green eyes. And she had not spoken a word until just now, when whatever feeling he’d experienced had slammed through him. The two cats were alone in a comfortable but cozy cavern in the heart of the jungle. They’d been alone for the past hour, and had only sat uncomfortably in silence, pretending to sleep though they both knew the type of day they’d had would not allow it.
Mila had scooted closer now, was sniffing Sam with concern as he squeezed his eyes shut and bore the sudden sickness that had befallen him.
The answer slammed into his mind only seconds after the sickness slammed into his stomach: Something was wrong with Surah. He couldn’t say how he knew this, but he did. He knew it as surely as he knew revealing it would only cause his new bride to hate him more.
But he wouldn’t lie to her. Mila deserved so much more than Sam thought he could give her, but at the very least, she deserved the truth.
The words came before he had a chance to stop them. I have to go back, Sam said.
For several long moments that felt like lifetimes to him, Mila said nothing, didn’t even blink as she stared at him in the darkness of the small cave. Just when he could no longer take the silence, Mila spoke, and said what he wouldn’t have expected her to say, though he supposed in truth he didn’t know her well enough anymore to expect anything.
“You are the king,” she said, and that was all.
She’s in trouble, Mila. Really big trouble.”
“You are the king,” she repeated.
Samson took to his feet, his anxiety over the wellbeing of his Surah too much to even consider ignoring. “That’s right,” he said, as he exited the cave. “I’m the King.”
CHAPTER 35
SURAH
One moment he was on top of her, his weight crushing the air from her chest, his hot, foul breath blowing into her face, as if the fires of hell burned in his belly. And the next moment he was gone, knocked from her as if by Magic, his awful, winged form flying to the side and setting her free.
Surah scrambled to her feet, reserving her Magic for the Banishment Spell. With a drop of her stomach, she saw who had come to her rescue. Theo, Lyonell, Noelani and Bassil stood off to the sides, one positioned in each of the four directions, swords at the ready and the looks of warriors on their faces.
She was grateful they’d come, but wished they hadn’t. Dagon was too powerful, and Surah had the most awful feeling swirling through her chest, a feeling that whatever was about to happen next would determine everything.
And as it turned out, she was right.
Dagon stalked over to Noelani first, breathing fire from his throat like a dragon, shooting the flames at Noelani, who rolled out of the way just in time. In this moment, Lyonell had moved in, slicing at the Dark Lord with his long Hunter’s blade, drawing more steaming, black ooze and beetles from the wound.
Surah charged at Dagon as well, but Bassil’s voice cut through the battle-induced haze. “Surah, the Spell,” the Shaman called out. “You must banish him.”
Gripping the Black Stone around her neck, blackness swirling like the universe in the violet of her eyes, growing more prominent than their natural purple, Surah began the Banishment Spell.
Everything that happened next happened in the tiniest space of time, just a handful of terrible seconds, really. Surah had only gotten three words into the incantation, and then the world slowed to an awful clarity, the scene before her producing images she would not soon forget, should she get the opportunity to not forget things again.
Lyonell’s brave strike at the Dark Lord was just a touch too slow, and Dagon gripped the Hunter’s neck and snapped it to the side the way one might break a twig between their fingers. The snap was audible, and it was this sound that seemed to freeze the world, to hold time still before letting the reality of what had just happened settle.
In the next instant there was a gut-wrenching scream, a cry so full of agony that it twisted her stomach just to hear it. Surah stood wide-eyed as Noelani charged Dagon with her blade. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her teeth were bared in horrible rage. She got snatched up as swiftly as her husband had, her neck snapped with just as much ease.
The Dark Lord tossed the two bodies of Surah’s personal Hunters to the side as if they were nothing more than cotton-filled dolls, and Lyonell and Noelani landed in lifeless heaps upon the ground.
For these fast, frozen moments, Surah could only stare in horror, her mind refusing to
process what it was seeing. She snapped back to focus when Bassil’s voice cut through the haze once more. He was approaching the Dark Lord with caution, his wooden staff clutched in his dark hand, his face as serious as an undertaker’s.
“Surah! You must complete the Spell!”
Again she began the incantation, trying her best to focus despite the absolute shock that was running through her at the recent turn of events. She told herself that she could not let Lyonell’s and Noelani’s deaths be in vain, that she would grieve later, that now was not the time for weakness.
But she was so angry, so wracked with emotions, her eyes still swirling with that unnatural black, and she reached into her cloak and threw a knife hard at Dagon, who had been approaching Theo. It stuck in the Dark Lord’s back and he roared out in anger.
Yes, Surah thought. She didn’t want to banish Dagon. She wanted to tear him limb from limb… and after the use of so much Black Magic, she was not even close to being in her right mind, or in control over her actions.
Dagon took to the air, apparently set on killing Surah, the heir he’d intended for her to carry be damned. His enormous wings beat at the sky, carrying him upward with a whoosh of air that lifted Surah’s lavender hair off her shoulders. Her head tipped back and she watched as he began his descent, coming down with enough force to crush her like an insect beneath his hooves. Surah didn’t care in the least that she was about to die… because she was going to take this bastard with her.
She slipped a long, sharp rod from her boot, where it had been strapped to her ankle, and waited. With as much force as Dagon was descending, he would crush her, but he would also impale himself. She had no thoughts for the consequences of this action, was not even aware of the fact that a crooked, crazed smile had found its way to her face.
Dagon’s form came closer, moving with speed that made him just a blur… and then Surah was hit hard in the side, knocked off her feet and onto the ground. For a moment, she thought she must be dead, but there was a sound, an awful crushing sound, and the earth beneath her vibrated with the impact of the Dark Lord.
Surah only got a glimpse of Theo’s face before his body was crushed under Dagon’s hooves, and the devotion in his gray eyes caused all the purple to leak out of hers.
She gave herself over to the Dark Magic of the Black Stone, and it enveloped her like a blanket, blocking out the emotions, the inclinations that made her who she was.
Her hands lifted into the air, and with them, so did the Dark Lord. Dagon’s glowing red eyes widened slightly as they took in the swirling, all encompassing black that dwelled in Surah’s. Her grin widened as she saw the uncertainty flash over his face, and then the fear.
With a flick of her Black Magic-filled fingers, she removed the Dark Lord’s head. It rolled free of his body and fell at her feet.
“You little bitch!” Dagon’s head screamed at her, his body flapping its wings and kicking at the air where she still held it suspended. Dark Lords could not be killed, for they were immortal, but like most physical beings, they could be dismembered, and their body parts banished to different parts of different worlds.
Especially by a powerful Sorceress in the full clutches of the Black Stone. Perhaps only by such a person.
Surah stooped down to Dagon’s still-cursing head, meeting his eyes with a calm that belied the turmoil in her soul. “I told you,” she whispered, grabbing the chin of the severed head and wrenching the jaws open, “if you came to my land I would remove your head, and then your tongue. So I guess you know what comes next.”
Gripping one of the spiraling horns atop the Dark Lord’s head, Surah grabbed his forked tongue with her free hand and began to saw, reveling in the agonized screams that were soon choked off with black, sticky blood.
Tongue in hand, she dismembered and banished the Dark Lord’s body to someplace no one would ever find it, and did the same with the tongue. The head, however, she picked up, looking down at it with swirling black eyes. A Dark Lord’s head, like any other being, contained its consciousness, and now that she’d relieved Dagon of his ability to speak, Surah thought it best she keep it close.
Also, she was more than a bit out of her mind at the moment. She was on the verge of hysterical laughter when a cough broke through her thoughts, clearing a bit of the clouds that had formed over her mind.
She turned and saw Theo, his once-strong body crushed beyond repair, the life quickly draining from his face as he stared at her from his broken position.
“Surah,” he said. Or tried to say. His words were choked off as blood bubbled from his mouth.
Surah went to him, kneeling at his side, a touch of sadness breaking through the storm that was her soul. She touched his handsome face, the emotions coming back, if only in tiny bits. She could almost reach the part inside her that made her who she was, but not quite. Her heart was too submerged in darkness to get the full effect of all that had taken place on this night.
But even a blind woman would see the devotion, the love that shined out of the Head Hunter’s eyes, and Surah knew that he was dying so she could live. Theodine Gray had sacrificed himself to save her, and some small part of Surah knew that if she survived this, his face in these final moments would haunt her for the rest of her life.
If she had doubted it before, there was no denying it now. Theodine Gray truly had loved her, and she had never done anything but shun this love. She should feel awful over this, and yet, she felt little to nothing.
Surah held the Head Hunter’s hand in his last moment, leaning down and meeting his eyes, in which the last light of his life was dimming. “Your death will not be in vain, Theo,” she promised. “Thank you for your service to my family… to me.”
Before she even finished saying this, Theo’s final breath escaped him and his face went dull and lifeless, his limp, ruined body lying before her, as had so many she’d cared for.
The voice in which she had spoken to Theo did not sound like her own, and when her body moved over to those of Lyonell and Noelani, it did not feel like she was commanding it. The darkness in her had taken a life of its own. The mixture of Black Magic and traumatic happenings would not be easily undone.
Surah stood beside her two dead best friends, the Hunters who had protected her for nearly a thousand years, since she’d been only a child. Noelani, her body crumpled, neck poised at an unnatural angle, who had read Surah bedtime stories and checked under her bed for monsters after her mother passed away. Lyonell, who had always been a calm and comforting presence, allowing Surah her independence while putting himself in harm’s way to ensure her safety. His neck was also bent in an awful way, his face and body devoid of life.
She looked down at the fallen, at her dead loved ones, the memories shared with them numbering in the thousands, and could feel nothing but rage and darkness, nothing but a primal, all-consuming need for revenge.
When a hand fell on her shoulder, Surah turned without thinking and flicked her wrist, sending whoever had touched her flying. She saw that it was Bassil as the Shaman struck the unforgiving ground, his patchwork cloak flying up over his long, dark legs in a manner that Surah found hysterical.
She was unaware of it now, but the laughter that issued from her throat also did not sound like her own. “Sorry,” she told the Shaman, though the tone in which the single word was spoken indicated that she was not sorry at all. “Now’s not a good time to sneak up on me, Shaman.”
Bassil pulled himself to his feet with some effort, a cautious grimace on his dark face. “That’s alright, my queen,” he said. His black eyes went to the head of Dagon, which Surah still held by one of the long, spiraling horns. It dangled from the end of her hand with blazing eyes and a mouth incapable of expressing its fury.
One corner of Surah’s mouth pulled up as her eyes followed Bassil’s. “That’s one problem taken care of,” she said.
The wary stance Bassil had taken was beginning to annoy her, and she felt an unreasonable amount of hostility toward the
Shaman. Bassil spoke slowly, the way one does to a man with a room full of hostages. “His denizens will come,” Bassil said, nodding toward the head of Dagon. “And the Fae army will come with them. There’s no way to avoid war now, my queen.”
Surah turned away from the Shaman, retrieving her cloak from the ground where the Dark Lord had tossed it after ripping it from her body. Dusting it off, she used some of the Magic still coursing through her to repair the rips and return it to her shoulders. Bassil stood silent, watching Surah as if she was a questionable beast that had wandered into the backyard.
Spinning in a slow circle atop the small hill overlooking the Sorcerer City, Surah surveyed her land, could feel the eyes of her people staring out at her from the shadows. When she spoke, her voice was cold, flat, and edged with a bit of excitement that scared the Shaman more than he would ever admit.
“There was never any way to avoid it,” Surah said. “Let them come. Let them come so I can kill them all.”
CHAPTER 36
CHARLIE
“Teleporting would be a buttload easier, ya know?” Aria said, looking sideways at Charlie as they waded through the dense trees of the New Jersey Pinelands.
Charlie swatted at what had to be the millionth green head fly (a name which Aria had provided) to bite him in the past hour. “I thought you said the Halflings have entrances to the other worlds everywhere,” he replied, stopping in his tracks to stare at the girl.
Aria pushed some of her red-brown hair out of her face. “We do, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather teleport.”
Charlie sighed and continued pushing through the unwelcoming vegetation. “I told you, I don’t want to be disoriented when we get there. I’m not used to teleporting, especially not whatever Fae version of it you do… How much further?”
