Apex

by Mercedes Lackey

  I heard a chuckle of agreement. “Roger that, Elite. Commendation noted.”

  When the last of the Goblins turned into goo, I took down the net and we sent back our now-replete Hounds, and I was feeling much more cheerful. Josh was still safe. Our packs had gotten bellies full of manna, and Cielle and I were supercharged with magic. I’d even gotten in a commendation for someone who deserved it. For the first time in too long, things were “normal.”

  I should have known that this was too good to last.

  THE ALARM JARRED ME out of bed, and I was on my feet and grabbing for clothing before I was properly awake. The corner of my vid-screen showed the time: five in the morning. Whatever was going on, it had to be bad. Worse, whatever fight we were getting into was going to take place in the dark.

  I slammed out the door and joined Scarlet; as we ran for the armory, we were both sticking receivers in our ears and strapping on helmets. There was organized chaos in the armory itself as we all snatched up our chosen weapons, plus anything else our sleep-fogged brains recognized as useful. As soon as I got myself sorted, I raced for the airfield. Choppers were already there, rotors spinning; another bad sign. I jumped into the first open door I saw.

  Hands grabbed me, hauled me in, and shoved me into a seat. I strapped down, and only then did I look around to see who was with me.

  Denali was to my right, with Tober and Mei beyond him. Archer was to my left. Across from us, in the seats flanking the door, were Dazzle and Hawk. We were all mixed up, but since nobody had said anything yet, I queried my Perscom, saw we were in Chopper Three, and called it in as the pilot took off with a steep tilt to the side. “HQ, HQ, Chopper Three away, Dazzle, Hawk, Archer, Tober, Mei, Joy.”

  We call got the callback immediately. “Roger, Chopper Three. Dazzle, Hawk, Archer, Tober, Mei, Joy. Elite Archer designated lead.”

  Archer responded immediately, his voice reassuring and calm. “Roger, HQ. Elite Archer designated lead, Team Three.” As Team Three, we’d all be on frequency three, and we tagged our Perscoms to reflect that and dialed it in.

  Before any of us could ask Archer what the heck was going on, we had to wait while the other teams called in and their leaders were assigned. I was relieved to hear Cielle was with Scarlet. Only once we were organized did HQ come back on the general freq to brief us.

  “We don’t know a lot. This was a surprise attack. There are none of the major Othersiders, but there are swarms of the smaller ones, and they are highly organized. They attacked the town of Creedence from all sides, having apparently gotten into position during the night. The few reports we have indicate that the town is overrun, and the Othersiders are breaking into homes and shelters. The army is on the way as well, but it’s going to be hand-to-hand, house-to-house, and street-to-street fighting. No air support, no artillery support except outside of town.”

  Basically, the worst-case scenario, since from the report, all the Othersiders were in town. And they were organized, which had to mean a Folk Lord on site. My heart sank.

  “Folk Lord’s been spotted,” said Archer, confirming what I thought. “Joy, you have the biggest number of Hounds. Keep back four and send the rest to look for him.”

  “Roger,” I answered immediately.

  “We’ll move as a team unless Kent says otherwise. When we hit the ground, follow me.”

  Well, that was the best we could do for planning in an unknown situation on the ground, with a Folk Lord orchestrating everything. We sat in the dark, the rattling vibration and the roar of the engine overhead, and hoped for the best.

  In a remarkably short period of time, Archer got on the radio again. “Coming in hot.”

  We hit the releases on our harnesses, and before I could even tell that the chopper had stopped moving, Archer was shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” We jumped out the door, hit the ground, ran a short distance out of rotor range, and summoned as the chopper lifted up and away. The area lit up with Glyphs, and the Hounds, sensing our urgency, came bursting through their Portals when we opened the Way.

  Bya, take the six and look for the Folk Mage, the fancy one. There should be one bossing all the rest. Hold, Strike, Myrrdhin, and Gwalchmai with me.

  Going, said Bya, and they were off, wearing their black greyhound shape for stealth. The rest packed up around me, and as soon as I ID’d Archer we were off after him, running for the town. Parts were dark, parts were lit, and parts were on fire—not good signs. I put on my gas mask.

  The first thing we hit, right at the edge of town, was a defensive perimeter of Nagas and Minotaurs. The Othersiders had made a poor choice for their first line of defense; neither had much in the way of Shields, and we just took them out with our assault rifles. The Hounds sucked up the manna, and within moments they were bursting with energy and we were bursting with magic.

  And that was the last easy moment we had.

  We got just inside the town when they hit us again. And this time they were Shielded.

  There were Folk Mages there. I saw at least three—the feral kind. They stayed back, but they were Shielding their troops. And these were troops; they moved as a unit, they were disciplined, and they held their lines. These were nothing like the usual Othersider mobs that flung themselves at us until something got through. They used actual tactics and coordinated with each other, leaving no one too open to attack. The lights were still on in this part of town, and we could see them far too clearly for my liking.

  “Joy, Tober, you have the best Shields. Drop what you’re doing and cover us. Dazzle, light ’em up on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark!”

  Tober and I had already put up nested Shields over the whole group when Archer started counting down. At “Mark!” we all ducked and protected our eyes. Even so, with all the magical energy available to her, Dazzle put up a display I could see through my eyelids.

  “Lights out, Dazzle,” Archer ordered. We looked up. The mobs of Nagas, Minotaurs, and Ogres were blinking blindly, unable to see. Behind them, the three feral Folk Mages stood there with tears pouring down their faces; they had lost the big Shields and only had their personal Shields, leaving their troops unprotected.

  Archer took full advantage of that. “Shields down! Hose ’em down!” We cut loose with our assault rifles; Archer began firing off his levin bolt arrows, aiming for the nearest Folk Mage. I suddenly had a bright idea. As his first three arrows left his bow, I fired off a spell of my own, the one that made Shields brittle. My spell hit the mage’s personal Shields right after the second of Archer’s shots. The first two dissipated on the Shields, but the third one cracked it, and the fourth one shattered it. The Folk Mage didn’t even have time to react; Archer’s fifth shot took him in the head.

  He went down and stayed down. As he fell, Archer nodded at me and then to the right; I targeted the second Folk Mage, and this one went down in three shots.

  We turned to take out the third one, but he was gone; his vision must have cleared in time to see us killing his comrades, and he wasn’t staying around to become victim number three.

  Without those Shields, we made better progress. The Ogres and Minotaurs were resistant to bullets, but not bulletproof; the Nagas couldn’t take rifle fire at all. We fought our way deeper into the town. But for every Othersider we killed, another came to take its place. Ogres were replaced by Redcaps, definitely harder to kill. Nagas gave way to Vampires, which were smarter and stronger and had limited regeneration in the dark. Worst of all, the Minotaurs were replaced by Yeth-hounds, which could fight our Hounds one-on-one.

  We were winning, but it was inch by bloody inch, and if it hadn’t been for the Hounds faithfully feeding us magic…we’d have already lost. We fought from light into darkness as we got into an area where all the power was out. We had night-vision goggles and put them on at Archer’s order, but some of the Othersiders had the night vision of owls or cats. We weren’t at a total disadvantage, but they were definitely better off than we were.

  We battled our way around a corner, whe
n suddenly our opposition turned and fled.

  They didn’t need to fight us anymore. Something more potent than Ogres and Nagas and Minotaurs lay around that corner.

  Manticores. Lots of Manticores. In my NVGs it seemed like too many to count, rank upon rank of them crowding the street in front of us, stingers quivering with the eagerness to strike. And we couldn’t use RPGs like we had on the first batch we encountered; we were surrounded by houses that almost certainly had innocent Cits cowering in there. Things looked grim.

  A heartbeat later, Team One came around the same corner behind us, which included Hammer and Steel. I switched freqs quickly and yelled “Manticores!” on their freq, and suddenly those wonderful sturdy Shields sprang up to cover us just as the front rank of the Manticores charged.

  We were dripping with sweat and barely holding our line as the sky lightened, and there still didn’t seem to be an end to the Manticores. Sure, they were vulnerable to bullets, but…

  “Shields down on my mark!” Archer called over our joint freq. Steel and Hammer dropped the Shields on cue, and the rest of us let loose with our ARs—but we didn’t get long, twenty seconds if that. Then the Manticore tails came lashing down at us, and spearheads of three packed closely together rushed our line at the weaker points. Archer called for Shields up again, just in time to save us from those stingers.

  We didn’t dare have the Shields down for more than a couple volleys, because the Manticores were wicked quick. And they were smart, smarter than nearly every other “small” Othersider we’d ever encountered, possibly as smart as the Folk; they could tell by the way we readied our weapons when the Shields were about to come down, and they were as fast as we were to take advantage of the situation.

  My Hounds were still diligently searching for the Folk Lord but hadn’t found him yet. Team Four had Manticores of their own to deal with. Team Two was cut off from us by fires. Team Five was actually trapped in their street by the debris from fallen buildings, because Othersiders had deliberately toppled the buildings before and behind them. There had to be a Folk Lord orchestrating all this, but where was he?

  Meanwhile, we—Team One and Team Three—were doing our best not to get divided up and picked off, because at this point it was pretty clear that was the Manticores’ strategy. They made smoothly coordinated attacks at weak points when the Shields came down, trying to isolate someone stuck on the outside of the group. We had almost no room to maneuver. I couldn’t even see past the people on either side of me.

  I could certainly tell where Cielle was without seeing her. The Shield would come down, and this fat beam of energy would cut a swath through the Manticores from left to right. Unfortunately, there were so many of them, she couldn’t give individuals more than a second of her attention, but her magic weapon still left them burning and howling in pain as it cut through them. The stink of burned hair and flesh was so thick that I was glad I’d resorted to my gas mask earlier to keep from choking on smoke.

  Gas mask! Suddenly it dawned on me that there was something I could do besides fire till the barrel of my rifle was hot. I bent down and grabbed a handful of spent brass from the pile at my feet, and cast a delayed spell on it. The next time the Shield came down, I lobbed that handful of spent brass over the heads of the Manticores in front of us, into their rear ranks, and kicked off the skunk-spell that was on the casings. I could tell by the sudden agitation and bellows of outrage back there that it was working.

  But while I’d been busy with that, the front ranks of the Manticores had made another push into us, and this time they succeeded in cutting someone off. I heard angry shouts, a scream—I turned my head in time to see one of those stinger tails whip down and back up again, and Archer snarled, “They’ve got Denali!”

  Hammer and Steel switched tactics, and suddenly part of the front rank of Manticores got shoved back about ten feet. That gave all of us a clear view—and shot—at the Manticore with Denali in its mouth. It was midway through a turn to run off with him. There was an open Portal right behind it!

  I let loose with levin bolts, Archer with his magic arrows, and Cielle gave a scream of pure rage and blasted it in the torso. In the next moment, my Hounds and Denali’s swarmed the damned thing. It dropped Denali as it opened its mouth to screech in pain; two Hunters dashed in right under its nose and dragged Denali away, as Hounds nipped and tormented it, and Cielle’s winged ones swooped in to harry it from above so it couldn’t put its stinger into play. Hammer and Steel snapped the Shields back up again; it bellowed again in rage and pain, then pivoted on its hind legs and ran back through the Portal.

  We found him! Bya shouted in triumph. The Folk Lord.

  I looked down at Myrrdhin, who was pressed up against my legs. Without my even asking him, he said to me, I will try to take us both to the rest of the pack. I will see to it that if we fail, we simply don’t go anywhere.

  And with that, I clung on to his neck, and we bamphed.

  We appeared right in the middle of my Alebrijes Hounds, between Bya and Dusana. And there, fifty yards from us, standing on a rooftop and illuminated by the first light of the sun, where he presumably had an excellent view of the chaos in the streets, was the golden Folk Lord.

  I wanted to kill him. I really wanted to kill him. But even if I couldn’t manage that, I had to get him to retreat so his flunkies would fall apart. So I levin bolted him, with the bolt carrying the embrittling spell with it. As he turned his head to look for the person who had fired on him, I let him have five bullets in the Shield.

  The fifth one shattered it, and that was when he spotted me, just as the Hounds and I snapped up our Shields.

  For one moment, as he locked eyes with me, the look on his face—I felt as if someone had just dumped me into an ice-covered lake at midwinter. The Folk are not human, and you can’t read them like a human—but there was the promise of murder in his eyes, I swear it.

  Then he smirked, smirked as if he knew something I didn’t and when I found out about it I was going to hate myself. And then he opened up a Portal behind him and vanished.

  In the next instant the assault fell apart. As the Hounds and I made our way back to our team on foot, Othersiders were streaming out of the town toward the open Portals on the outskirts. For the most part we pressed up close to the houses on the left side of the street, kept heavy Shields up, and avoided confrontations, although the Hounds quivered with the suppressed desire to attack.

  By the time I got back to where the rest of the team ended up and reported to Kent, the last Othersiders were either dead or gone. Denali was unconscious, with a stinger-hole in his shoulder—once again, it was obvious that the Manticores had wanted him alive, not dead, because that strike took precision and timing.

  As the residents of the town emerged from hiding, many of them screaming and crying, we discovered that there had been more to this raid than just the usual “break into the houses and eat everyone you can.” And I found out just what that Folk Lord had been smirking about.

  Because the Manticores had been after something else. At least half the children were gone—and according to the witnesses who could speak without weeping, they had been carried off and through Portals by the Manticores.

  Kent sent everyone back on the choppers but himself, Archer, Scarlet, and Steel. As the most senior Elite, he had taken control of the area and, with the army commander, was fortifying and protecting the town while Scarlet, Archer, and Steel were taking statements.

  Mark had gotten hurt—not badly, but he’d gotten blindsided by a charging Minotaur that had lost its ax and head-butted him instead, and he was bruised absolutely black all down one side, despite his body armor. I made him go to the medics even though he insisted that he was all right.

  “Jessie would skin us both if you just go back to your quarters,” I scolded him. “And she’ll do worse than skin you if you go back on duty without being checked out.”

  While he continued to protest, I walked him to the medbay. I kind of ho
ped we could avoid his wife, Jessie, who worked there, at least as long as I was with him. We weren’t the only Hunters there, either, though most of the attention was on Denali, who had been hooked up to IVs and monitors as soon as he’d been brought in.

  I managed to get a medic’s attention long enough for him to take scans and pronounce Mark more or less fit for duty, and pass him a bottle of mild painkillers that I knew he wasn’t going to take. Just then, Jessie spotted us both there. It was too late for me to get away gracefully, so I stayed put as she turned her attention to Mark.

  “What happened?” she demanded.

  “Nothing,” said Mark.

  I snorted. “He got body-slammed by a Minotaur, and half of him is bruised, but no broken bones. Medics gave him painkillers, said he’s fit for duty.”

  “Give ’em t’me,” she demanded, holding out her hand. Sheepishly, he did so, and she examined them, then shook out two. “Hev you taken ’em?” she asked. He shook his head. “Take these here now,” she ordered. He did so, dry-swallowing them, a trick I wished I could learn. “I’ll track you down in six hours if’n you’re not on a callout, an’ make damn sure you take two more.”

  I pretended not to notice any of this. She peeled up the side of his tunic to have a look too, which I also pretended not to notice.

  “How’s Denali?” I asked, when she was done.

  Her expression faded from annoyance into real concern. “He’s still in a coma. No one’s been able to figger out the poison those monsters used on him, an’ fillin’ him up with th’ wrong antivenin is gonna do more harm than good. All we c’n do is support him, treat any other symptoms, an’ hope it wears off in time.”

  I grimaced, although having gotten a good look at him before they loaded him into a chopper, this was pretty much what I had expected to hear. Short of catching a live Manticore and milking the sting for venom to make antivenin, there wasn’t much anyone could do about Denali’s condition.