Bitter Night

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  One word. If she could muster just one word and push it out through her ruined mouth.

  One word that would make him understand that she had not lied.

  Promise.

  No one made promises in the world of the Uncanny and Divine. It was bad enough to acknowledge a debt. But promises went deeper than magic or memory or blood; they were bonds that could never be broken.

  Max struggled to form the word. She forced her desiccated tongue to shape the syllables, pushing the word through the charcoal tissues of her throat and beyond her teeth. She could not feel her lips, if she even had them.

  It was a mighty effort, but too little, and far too late. Her heart spasmed and she went rigid.

  Then coolness seeped through her. Where it touched, the pain leached away. It swallowed her, shielding her from the heat. Slowly she became aware that she was pressed close against Xaphan, his arms wrapped around her, one hand stroking the back of her neck. His forehead was pressed to her shoulder.

  As her vision returned, she could see that the conflagration still surrounded them. But she did not feel the heat. She licked her lips’she licked her lips. Somehow Xaphan was healing her.

  He did not let go of her as he lifted his head. His expression was tortured. “Tell me,” he said.

  Max babbled, wasting no time. “I let the Hag in Julian feed on my blood. She gave me a hailstone in return. I used it to make the Guardians forget Horngate ever existed. I made them forget everyone who belongs to Horngate. If it worked, and if you were bound to us, then Hekau would forget you. I promise it’s the truth.”

  He gaped, his arms flexing so hard that Max felt her bones creak. She did not fight him. That was the last thing she needed to do right now.

  “Do you have proof?” he rasped.

  She shook her head. “No.” Only actually doing it would say for certain. “What have you got to lose?”

  She knew the answer. Nothing. And everything. Hope was a treacherous thing. Letting it grow only to have it ripped up by the roots could do more damage to him than his fire had done to her.

  “If it fails, I will still have to destroy Horngate.” His jaw was rigid and she could read the pain etching grooves around his eyes and mouth. His compulsion spells were grinding on him.

  Max took a sudden breath as an idea struck her. Could it be so simple? But of course it was. She had told Giselle so. Words like promise and owe meant something to creatures like her and Xaphan. They meant more than any spell or compulsion. Those words were carved into their souls because they were offered freely, straight from the heart. No binding could tie anyone tighter.

  She pushed back slightly. His arms loosened, but he did not let go. It was as if she were his anchor in a far greater maelstrom than the fire that whirled around them.

  “I ask you for your word. Promise me that you will protect and serve Horngate in the best way you know how.”

  It was like she’d slugged him. His face went slack and every muscle in his body knotted. “What is this?” he whispered. “What are you asking?”

  “There is no binding stronger than your word given freely. Promise me to protect and serve Horngate, and that’s all I need.”

  “All you need? What about your witch?”

  Max smiled slowly. “This isn’t about her. She may be the heart of the covenstead, but the rest of us are its blood and its teeth. She’ll accept. I promise that, too.”

  “Can you?”

  The fact was that Giselle wouldn’t like it one bit. She’d want more guarantees. But she couldn’t have them, not today. Besides, if Xaphan broke his promise, he wouldn’t be part of Horngate anymore, and then Hekau would come for him. It was powerful motivation.

  “All I need’all Giselle needs’is your word,” Max said firmly.

  He started to speak, then coughed. His body tremored and his neck corded as he struggled against his compulsion spells. “You have it. I promise to protect and serve Horngate to the best of my ability,” he rasped as silvery blood flowed down his nose and out his mouth.

  As soon as the words were out, a wave of power pulsed through the air. It swept away from them, shredding the wall of flames.

  Max grinned, her body going weak with relief. Holy crap. It worked. “Welcome to the family.”

  “Family?” he repeated dazedly.

  There was no time to reply. They were surrounded by Sunspears and Shadowblades. A bristling Alexander was at her left shoulder, his gun aimed at Xaphan’s forehead. On the right was Niko, his gun a scant two inches from the angel’s eye.

  “Let her go,” Niko ordered.

  Xaphan smiled and let his arms fall. Max stepped back, feeling giddy. Her body throbbed with remembered pain but her heart was racing. She wanted to jump up and down.

  “You do realize you can’t actually kill him, right?” she asked the two men. “And he can probably burn you to a crisp before you get off more than a couple of shots.” Gently she pushed both of their arms up. “Anyway, it’s all right. He’s one of us now.”

  “One of us?” Niko echoed incredulously. He wasn’t the only one.

  She turned and glanced around the circle, frowning at how few remained. Oz was on his feet, but his skin was mostly black, dappled here and there with patches of healthy-looking flesh. He slumped, leaning hard against Tyler.

  “That’s right,” she said crisply, her jaw jutting. “He belongs to Horngate. Now I want all the Sunspears under cover. Take them around to the Mossy Log entrance.” She glanced at Xaphan. “Can you put out your fires?”

  He nodded and leaped into the air. He quickly disappeared into the smoke.

  “Alexander, Niko, and Tyler stay with me. The rest of you, help the Sunspears inside, then come back for the wounded.”

  They responded instantly. Oz tried to fight them, but was dragged away. Max turned to eye Tutresiel. He stood thirty feet away, his wings folded, his sword braced against his shoulder. He was waiting for her. How the hell had they managed to get him to do that? Max strode toward him, her mouth dry. Xaphan had been willing to listen because they’d shared a fragile bond from their first meeting. Tutresiel was a stranger.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Niko asked beside her.

  “Yes,” she said tersely, and hoped it was true.

  The angel waited, his legs planted wide. He wore leather biker pants with zippers up the sides of his lower legs and heavy boots. The pants were charred and holed from the RPGs and bullets. His torso was bare, the scraps of his shirt on the ground beside him. Streaks of silvery blood decorated his skin, mixing with smudges of black char.

  He watched Max, his face brooding. “I am told you want to talk to me.” He looked up as Xaphan dropped out of the sky to land behind Max. His black brows rose as he lifted his sword from his shoulder. “Are you ready to begin again?”

  “It depends on what you decide,” the fire angel said.

  “Decide? About what?”

  “Joining Horngate,” Max said. She held up a hand before he could rake her over the coals. “Just hear me out. If you’re like Xaphan, you’re not any happier serving your Guardian than he is. If that’s the case, I want to offer you a deal. You can join Horngate and you will be free of Marduk.”

  Tutresiel sneered, but he couldn’t look away from Xaphan. “That’s impossible.” He didn’t sound all that certain.

  “It is possible,” Xaphan said with a sort of childlike wonder.

  “How?”

  “She swallowed a Hag’s hailstone and made a wish that the Guardians would forget Horngate and anyone who belongs to the covenstead.”

  That caught Tutresiel up short. “You believe her.” It wasn’t really a question.

  “It’s true. I have bound myself to this coven. I am free of Hekau. You saw the magic of the binding.”

  “You bound yourself?” Now Tutresiel was surprised.

  “I promised to protect and serve Horngate,” Xaphan said. “It was enough.”

  “So now the question is, do you
want the chance to join the covenstead?” Max asked.

  “And if I don’t?”

  She gave a tight smile. “We go back to fighting you. And if the covenstead is destroyed in the process, then you and Xaphan go back to running errands for your Guardians, and we become fertilizer.”

  “And if I agree?”

  Max stepped forward until she was a couple of inches away from the sword. She met his crimson gaze, reading the hope that warred with cynicism and hostility. “Then you have to promise to protect and serve Horngate to the best of your ability.”

  “What if I lie?”

  She smiled slowly. “Then the binding won’t take and we’ll go back to fighting. Thing is, though, Xaphan has a whole lot more motivation to win than he used to.” She hesitated. “I’m not saying you get out of jail free, though. You know what’s coming. The war is going to get ugly and Giselle doesn’t mean to be a pawn in it. We won’t sit here behind a curtain of forgetting while the rest of the world goes to hell. She wants to build a sanctuary here, and she’ll want you to help. All you’re doing is changing masters.”

  His lip curled. “You might do better luring me with honey rather than salt.”

  “Salt is the meal. I tell it like I see it. No surprises, no lies. Just plain, unvarnished truth. If you are going to choose us, you do it with full disclosure. I don’t want to hear you whining later.”

  He didn’t immediately respond, his gaze settling on Xaphan behind her. Max wondered what was going on in his head. She had little enough sense of him. That he listened at all showed both that he wanted to snap his tether, and that he acted thoughtfully.

  Finally he gave a slow nod, and the white fire of his sword faded until the blade appeared to be normal steel. His hands tightened and his body went rigid. He opened his mouth and no sound came out. His face contorted and he staggered back and fell to one knee. His body convulsed and the sword clattered to the ground. He doubled over, catching himself with his hands. A web of blue magic wrapped him, and he flung himself backward with a harsh scream, his wings scraping and chopping wildly. Someone grabbed Max to drag her out of the way, and she shrugged the hands off. She needed to witness this. She stepped closer.

  The magic web began to solidify, cocooning him in a solid shell. Tutresiel was swept by a seizure, his arms and legs kicking and twitching, his body bucking wildly. Max hesitated, then did something supremely stupid. She flung herself on top of him. Electricity zapped her like she’d plugged her finger into a transformer. Her hair rose on end and her muscles seized.

  “Say it!” she urged, her body spasming, tears streaming down her face. “Say it!”

  The words were broken and sounded as if they were cut from his throat with his own sword. “I ...swear ...to serve and ...protect Horngate ΓǪ”

  Once again a wave of power rushed away as the binding took. The attacking blue magic vanished, and Max slumped on top of him. “I need a fucking nap,” she muttered.

  Hands pulled her up. Alexander and Niko held her between them. Her legs were like jelly. Tutresiel hadn’t moved. He looked at her, his expression bemused. “It worked.”

  “Yeah. Welcome to the nuthouse,” she said. A moment later she felt strong enough to push away from Niko and Alexander. She turned to look at the carnage of the battle. There were too many bodies. Her chest ached as a different pain lodged there. It wasn’t going away soon, she knew. Who was dead? She could see at least ten bodies. “Let’s check for survivors. Take the wounded Sunspears first. They need to get out of the night as soon as possible.”

  She glanced at Xaphan, her jaw rigid so that she wouldn’t scream. “That healing trick of yours’can you help them?” He nodded and went to examine the closest body. She looked at Tutresiel. “What about you?”

  He shook his head. “I have no ability to heal. I will help ferry them inside, if you will show me the way.”

  “Follow me,” Niko said. His expression was a mask of grief. He was holding Lise. She was bloody, her skin charcoal gray.

  “Give her to me and run,” Tutresiel ordered, holding out his arms.

  His sword was gone. Max had no idea where it had gone. Niko hesitated, then allowed the angel to take her. He immediately turned and started running. Tutresiel leaped into the air, skimming over the ground right behind, his wings pumping powerfully.

  Max drew a breath and tried to make herself go to the cold place inside where she couldn’t feel the horror of losing the lives of the people she had sent to die. Family. Dead family.

  Alexander was kneeling over someone. He turned him onto his back and checked his pulse. Kamikani. Alexander looked up at Max, sympathetic sorrow coloring his expression. She looked away, feeling the glacial walls inside her starting to crack. She needed that cold strength now. There was still work to do. Selange was inside with all her Shadowblades and Giselle, and the moment the angel battle stopped, she’d have realized that Max succeeded. It wouldn’t take her two seconds to decide to snatch Horngate for herself. But to do that, she’d have to kill Giselle.

  “Finish this,” she ordered over her shoulder as she sprinted across the scorched battlefield as fast as she could go.

  22

  MAX DIDN’T HEAD FOR THE MOSSY LOG EN-trance. Instead she headed up the mountain on an angle, up past Cougar’s Leap, through Miner’s Notch to the top of Elk Point. All the trees here had burned to ash and the ground still smoked, though true to his word, Xaphan had put out the fires. She reached the hatch she was looking for. It had been buried beneath a thick layer of leaf meal and huckleberries, but was now carpeted with soft, hot ash. Max brushed it away. The latch was melted and fused. She dug her fingertips into the crack between the door and its jamb and yanked upward. The warm steel stretched and tore. She grabbed the sharp edges and ripped them apart, slicing her hands. The metal groaned and screeched. In seconds she had a hole big enough to pass through.

  On the other side was a shaft like the one she and Alexander had climbed up out of. It had been too far away to suffer damage from the magic of Tutresiel’s sword blows. Max swung down and gripped the top rung, her feet finding purchase lower. There was no time to climb down. She hooked her boots around the outside of the ladder and grasped the sides. She loosened her fingers and began to slide down.

  The skin and flesh of her palms turned raw and then shredded away. The blood only slicked the runners of her slide. Fifteen feet above the bottom she jumped, landing in a crouch and leaving behind a bloody handprint on the floor. She launched to her feet and was running in the same breath.

  The underground warren that tunneled beneath Horngate was not laid out in any particular pattern. Rather it was a constellation of clusters of rooms and chambers connected by snaking passages. These circled a hub made up of the massive central hall, the kitchens, and common areas. Max ran through the maze, vaulting down entire flights of stairs. She’d lost the gun Oz had given her and stopped only once, at a weapons locker, jamming two knives into her back pockets and grabbing a shoulder holster and sliding it on. It already held a loaded .45 and four full clips. She chambered a shell and started running again.

  The closer to the hall she got, the harder it was to get through. She climbed over rubble and squeezed through tiny crevices. More than once she had to retreat and try a new route. At last she came to the lofty outer chamber of the hall. Much of the timbered roof had collapsed, and with it, massive chunks of rock. Not a single pillar still stood, and the air was thick with dust. It was eerily silent except for a trickle of pebbles tumbling from above, and the crunch of debris beneath her feet.

  The exit she and Alexander had used to leave the hall was still clear. Max eased up to it and peered inside.

  The devastation was terrible. Smoke and dust choked the air, though the fires were out. The long fissure gaped in the roof of the mountain, and Xaphan’s battle fire had burned mercilessly through the hall. The smell of burned flesh turned Max’s stomach. She heard moans and agonized whimpers. She scanned the wreckage. Where was Gis
elle? The spells that bound them together told Max that the witch was alive, but for how long? Selange would not wait to make her move, and make it she would’she needed the haven that Horngate would give her from the Guardians, and the fact that two angels were now bound to Horngate would only whet Selange’s appetite more.

  Max riveted on voices from the other end of the hall. She slid inside, creeping over the wreckage with predatory silence. The witches were not where she had left them. They had shifted across the hall and away from the fissure above. Ash stirred around her feet as Max passed. She hunched over, keeping her profile as small as possible.