by Eric Asher
Pain brought me back into the moment. “Sam!” I managed to bark out as a dark-touched’s claws bit into my arm.
It was only then I realized what had happened to the third dark-touched. It was battling my sister at the far end of the field. “Goddammit.”
The sword nearly cut my nose off. The skeletal arm that followed confused me. It had no flesh, no muscle to give it life. But its blade bit into the dark-touched’s eye just the same. The vampire squealed and backpedaled, flinging his claws into the night air. That gave me a much-needed split second to raise the soulsword once more.
I found myself standing not beside Graybeard, but beside one of his crew. The old stained bones knocked his teeth together, glanced at me, and then surged toward the reeling dark-touched.
But if that skeleton had come from behind us, and it had come through the water spout … a glance behind me showed the water spout failing. The cyclone broke, and fire rose where there had been water moments before. The entire structure collapsed, sending debris soaring through the air. Water witches fell from that spiraling torrent, more than I would’ve thought possible. The water spout hadn’t been the work of single water witch, but dozens working in tandem.
I cursed as I realized the spout might have been broken, but now we had more enemies on the ground. Two more of Graybeard’s men charged past me. These didn’t carry swords like the first—they carried long narrow spears. These skeletons had fought against the dark-touched in the Burning Lands. They’d honed their weapons and learned how to strike the dark-touched vampires when the odds against them were far worse than what we faced now. I didn’t think the skeletons would be able to overpower the dark-touched vampires, but they didn’t need to.
From six feet out, ten feet out, they struck at the vampires, their spears thrusting, returning, and thrusting again. The strikes glanced off the dark-touched’s armor three times before one found its mark. The vampire collapsed as the spear pierced just the right part of its brain in its long sloping skull. Two of the skeletons were still beside me, but the third had charged-off to help Sam with the remaining dark-touched.
“I think you’re better at this than I am,” I said, earning what I imagined was a chattering laugh from the skeleton. “I’m going to help the others. We have water witches.”
The skeleton nodded at me, a disturbingly human gesture. I didn’t know why that had bothered me more than a reanimated skeleton, but something about it just seemed unnatural.
I glanced back one last time as I closed on the cinder block building. Far in the distance, I saw the ghostly masts of the Bone Sails, and the cannons on Graybeard’s ship roared to life once more.
“Sam,” I shouted. “Right!”
I didn’t alter my stride. I stayed focused on reaching the cinder block building, but I caught a glimpse of Sam’s sword slashing out to her right, catching a surprised water witch. The wounded cry was all I needed to hear to know Sam had found her mark. By the time I reached the edge of building, the skeletons had engaged the last of the dark-touched.
Or, at least, the dark-touched I could see.
I sprinted toward the cinder block wall, sliding on damp grass and slamming into the structure with my shoulder. The stone wall felt gritty beneath my skin. I edged to the corner and peeked around in time to hear a boom from inside the building. I took a half step back as a water witch’s body flickered between translucent fluid and gray stone near the doorway.
She screamed, but the sound cut off intermittently as fragments of whatever had hit her moved through her body. Parts of the witch became stone, and then flesh, only to return to a clear fluid. Her face contorted, creased in agony until a soldier reached out with one of the daggers Mike had enchanted. The dagger embedded in her neck finished the job.
“Take her head off.”
The soldier looked up at me in surprise, and I was glad to see that the youngest of them was still alive.
“Welcome to the party,” she said.
“Get back inside. I’ll finish this.”
The soldier ripped the dagger through the water witch’s neck before raising her M16 and firing point-blank into the wounded undine.
I heard the ricochet of a bullet before someone squawked in pain inside the building.
“You shot me!” a familiar voice shouted.
“Shit,” I muttered. I followed the private into the building. Maps, posters, and documents I couldn’t identify at a glance adorned the walls. Half a dozen workstations were set up with multiple monitors. Frank was in the corner.
“I’m so sorry,” the private said. She reached out to Frank, and he yelled when her fingers reached the wounded arm.
“Isn’t that exactly where the vampire bit you?” I asked, eyeing Frank’s wound.
“Yes!” Frank snapped. “How kind of you to notice.”
I frowned at the table behind Frank, where Casper was working furiously with what appeared to be a reloading die and three cans of gunpowder.
“Two hours?” Park shouted from the far corner opposite Frank. “We’re under attack now! Get those reinforcements out here now, or it’s your ass.” Park angrily smashed his finger against the screen. It just didn’t have the same effect as slamming a receiver down.
I snatched the first aid kit off the wall and tossed it to Frank. “Wrap it for now. The fairies can fix you up later. Just, you know, don’t bleed out or anything.”
“Your compassion knows no bounds,” Frank muttered.
“Today’s lesson,” I said, turning from one private to the next, “Don’t shoot the water witches after they turn to stone. Bullets can ricochet off them as easily as a rock.”
I tucked the focus securely into my belt and crouched down beside Casper. “Did you take that shot?”
“Of course,” she said. “Damian, powder.” I popped the top off the can and slid it to her. She didn’t even look, just kept her eyes on the scale as she tipped a few grains into a small cup. She measured and poured the rest into some brass before sliding the entire assembly into a die, placing one of Mike’s bullets at the tip. A quick throw of the lever and she had a fully functional round for the rifle on the table. “How many of those have you made?”
“Three left in the magazine,” Casper said. “And don’t ask if you can help.”
Casper wasn’t the first person I’d met who was very particular about reloading. She was, however, the first person I’d met who was very particular about reloading while in the middle of a firefight.
“There’s at least one more water witch to the west. The others are closer to the river. Has anyone seen Foster? The fairy I came here with?”
“Not since he was fighting that fireball,” a private said.
“I saw him at the other end of the tents,” Park said. “Before I made it back here to command.”
“Good,” I said. “Oh, and if you see any skeletons running around, they’re on our side.”
Park blinked at me.
A private nestled in the front corner of the building, stuck so deeply in the shadows that I hadn’t seen him, said, “Water witch incoming.”
Casper laid two more rounds on the table. She left them standing on their primers and scooped up the M16. She leveled it at the doorway, and we waited.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that an attack doesn’t always come from where you expect it. The front door of the building had been pulled off at some point in the battle, leaving the only other covered entrance the reinforced steel door at the other end. The attack came from neither.
The private stationed just inside the doorway howled as a sword sliced through his guts, penetrating the cinder blocks behind him. Two more blades slid through the opposite wall, narrowly missing Frank’s head. He stumbled toward the center of the room, and crouched down behind Casper.
“Get away from the walls!” Park said.
The wounded private at the front of the building collapsed. I dashed forward, scooping him up from beneath th
e shoulders and dragging him away from the entrance. It was exactly what the water witches wanted. One of them shot through the doorway, and I was blocking Casper’s view. I tossed the injured private to the side, hoping that the landing on the table wouldn’t do too much damage as he sprawled across it. I dropped to the floor as fast as I could, but the water witch followed me down. “Impadda!”
The shield sprang to life, and I caught the water witch before her dagger found my flesh. Blue sparks flashed and popped in the interior of the command building. I shoved the water witch up as high as I could and shouted, “Fire!”
Casper did.
The round tore through the undine’s head, entering the eye socket and blasting a mixture of stringy viscera and watery stone out the back. It wasn’t like the last witch. This one fell still. She was dead in an instant, and the parts of her that weren’t stone returned to water.
I turned my attention back to the wounded private as swords continued to pierce the building. It didn’t take long to realize they were following a pattern, compromising the supports and cutting their way in.
Frank wrapped the injured man’s wound in a compression dressing as best he could, but the injury looked bad. I wasn’t sure anyone could recover from that. But I knew Foster couldn’t heal it in his wounded state. The man needed a hospital, and he needed one now.
I closed my eyes and pushed out my aura, seeking my sister. It wasn’t hard to find her. The auras of the fast-moving dead surrounded her. I suspected that meant the skeletons were still taking up arms with her and were staying by her side. Graybeard had always liked her better.
“Sam, we’re inside command. We need you. Water witches.”
I got an impression of her turning toward the building, and then our connection cut off.
If Sam was closing on the water witches from the north, I’d surprise them from the doorway. “I’m going out. Anything comes back in that isn’t one of us, shoot it in the head.”
I darted out the doorway to the protests of those inside. I curled around the building to my right and spun on the bloody flattened grass beside a long-dead soldier.
The water witches were no longer attacking the building. They were focused on the vampire who was screaming like a banshee. Sam charged at them, her left hand spread wide as though her fingernails were claws and the sword bared in her right. Graybeard’s crewmen followed behind her.
The first water witch struck, but Sam moved almost faster than my eyes could follow. Her sword cut through the water witch’s arm before slicing up her torso, leaving a screaming, writhing half-stone thing on the ground for the skeletons to demolish. The next water witch hesitated, and by the time she realized that was a mistake, Sam’s sword was already embedded in her head. Sam pushed the witch backward, her sword stuck through the screaming undine’s jaw.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Sam hissed. She slammed the water witch’s head against the building until the cinder blocks cracked, bits of mortar falling away with the undine’s life. Sam ripped her sword out of her enemy’s head and turned to face me.
“Is Frank okay?” Sam asked, lips in a tight line. Her aura pulsed with a red rage I’d rarely seen.
“He’s okay, but he got clipped. Have you seen Foster?”
Sam shook her head. It wasn’t the answer I was hoping for.
“We need Aideen. The soldiers in there, some of them are injured.”
A rhythmic clacking of bone on bone drew my attention back to the skeletons at Sam’s side. One of them was almost hopping up and down, pointing behind us to a part of the tent city that was no longer a pillar of flame, but a smoldering cloud of toxic fumes.
Massive trees swayed in a wind I didn’t feel. I frowned at the sight, the slow rise of that cloud, unaffected by the winds. “Son of a bitch. There’s one more witch on the other side of the building.”
Two claps of thunder sounded from the far corner of the command center, and my eyes snapped up to see a half-frozen witch collapsing on top of the roof.
Casper appeared at the corner of the building. “No more witches. Go.”
“Come on, Sam,” I said. Before I finished speaking, Sam snatched me up off the ground, and I was suddenly hurtling through space under the arm of a vampire.
She dashed through the burning remnants of the tents, where I would’ve had to go around. She held me high enough to keep the flames away, and moved fast enough I barely had time to register the super-heated air before we cleared the other side.
She sat me down, and I wobbled for a moment on my feet. I cursed and drew the focus from my belt. Clear of the fires, I could see two Green Men squaring off against Foster, while another clashed with Aeros. The creature facing the Old God was an abomination, a titan of bark and magic. I suspected it was at least twice as large as the other two. That put the Green Man close to thirty or forty feet tall. I couldn’t be sure how tall the damn thing was, but the blows it rained down on Aeros were terrifying. The Green Man drove the rock god inches into the earth as if it had the strength of a harbinger and the speed of the Old God.
The sagging branches of the Green Man closest to Foster snapped out like a whip, and Foster’s grunts of pain confirmed the hit.
“Get out of there!” I shouted.
I wasn’t sure if he could hear me. I wasn’t sure how much damage he’d taken, but I could see that the white of his wings was splashed with blood, and only one of his arms was striking back as fairy dust mixed into the red stream.
“Damian,” Sam said. “What are you doing?”
I stared at my sister as the chaff of the gravemaker rose beneath my feet and crawled up my thigh. “You know what to do. If this goes wrong, you know how to stop me.”
I didn’t hear her response as the rusted black and bark closed over my head.
The forest of swords, as I’d come to think of it, wasn’t much harder to conjure than the Hand of Anubis. But conjuring it made it a lot harder for me to remain inside my own head. The power required might not have been much more, but the potential loss of control terrified me. But if these guardsmen all died, and the only witnesses left were us, then Drake’s frame would be a smashing success. And they’d all hunt us down, regardless.
To keep my city safe, my family safe, I had to take the risk.
The presence of that damned flesh around me felt welcoming, but that unnerving fact kept me grounded. It let me feel the shadows crawling across the hairs on my arms and the thousands of souls that had gone into its creation.
“Foster,” I said, my voice twisted into the guttural howl of the gravemaker. I knew when the corroded flesh had pulled away from my eyes because the scene before me turned into a milky-white nightmare. I could see the ley lines running beneath the earth, making their way to the river. The tendrils of blue and green magic wound up into the Green Men, animating them, becoming their life force. But there was something else in that twisted mass of magic, something dark.
Foster stood out against the shadows like a beacon of light, a brilliant sun of bright reds and deep blues. I saw the form twist to look at me before it dove toward the earth, dodging another strike from the radiant Green Men.
“Vesik,” Aeros’s voice boomed through my mind. “Do not lose yourself here.”
I opened my mouth to scream as my fists clenched and pillars of the dead streaked into the night sky. If I hadn’t known what formed those awful things, I might have thought they were stone or metal trees that had rusted in some forgotten art installation. My palms opened with a snap, the elongated fingers of the gravemaker around my own, crackling and crunching as the power surged through them. Dozens of spear-like constructs erupted from the pillars around the Green Men, splitting bark and the softer flesh beneath. By the time the Green Men finished moving, all they had left to do was burn.
All it took was a thought, and fire burst from those pillars of death, racing across their branches until the Green Men ignited in earnest. I felt the flesh along my forearms again, felt the shadows seeki
ng to dig their roots in deeper. I knew what the gravemakers wanted. They wanted me.
But if they had me, they had Vicky. They had Sam. And from there, our allies would unravel. If we lost here, we lost everything.
Something grabbed my shoulders, and my eyes rolled up to find Sam. Screaming. “Stop now!”
Slowly, painfully, I let Zola’s training seep into my mind. The same mantras she’d taught me to close out the voices of the dead when we visited places like Gettysburg. I remembered the peace of the cabin in the middle of the woods. The summer nights spent with no one but the frogs and the lizards and the wildlife to keep me company.
I felt the shadow dig deeper into my arms, but I knew it would find no purchase. Zola had trained me too well, and this was not my time. The flesh began sloughing away. The blackened ruin attached to my right arm gave way first, revealing the red and tortured skin underneath. It looked as though I had laid out in the sun for hours, days. My vision dimmed as the gravemaker flesh covering my head fell away, only to brighten as my eyes returned to normal and I understood fully what I had done.
The two towers of the dead had company. The Green Men, when they had no life running through their flesh, looked instead like displaced trees propped up by failing power lines. The power sparked and faded as the entire scene started collapsing. It gained momentum, until the dead flesh gave way in earnest into an avalanche of ash.
I surveyed the battle around us. Most of the field had fallen still, but bursts of gunfire and screams erupted over the crackling fires. A small circle of soldiers shuffled their wounded into their center, and chased a water witch off with a small dagger and a masterful distraction.
The rest of our enemies started retreating, what few had survived.
I took a deep ragged breath and looked up at Sam from my knees. “Thank you.”
“You’re an idiot,” she snapped. “You got my boyfriend shot and nearly set us on fire.”
She trembled slightly, crossing her arms before turning her attention back to Aeros.
