Vesik Series Boxset Book 3

by Eric Asher

  Nixie frowned and laid her hand on my forearm. “You can’t. You can’t use that on the dark-touched. We don’t know if killing one of those with one of Mike’s weapons will break his oath, and end his life.”

  It was a terrible thought, that our most powerful weapon might only be used at the cost of one of our closest friends. I cursed. “If it becomes a matter of saving thousands, or taking that risk, I don’t know that I can say no.”

  Nixie’s hand fell away. “I understand. But you must not use that casually. If Nudd realizes you still have it, he will bring his army down on you all at once.”

  I looked away for a moment. “Let’s just try not to die today.”

  “The power is not just coming from you,” Angus said. “It’s the cu siths. They’re drawing power from the nexus.”

  “Will the queen sense it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nixie said. “I don’t have much experience with blood shields. The fact so few people know of the nexus tells me it is effective. But if Angus can sense it now, I don’t know what will happen when the fireballs pull on it in earnest.”

  “Shit,” I spat. “Let’s move.”

  “Now this is a battle,” Angus shouted, an edge of joy in his voice that made me somewhat concerned for the fairy’s sanity.

  “What are you talking about? We have no plan, no allies, no backup, and we’re probably going to die badly.”

  Angus launched himself off Nixie’s shoulder, and exploded into his full-size form, sending a rainbow of fairy dust across the ground. “As your people say, ain’t it grand?”

  I exchanged a glance with Nixie. “He’s lost his fucking mind.”

  “We’re still running headlong into an army. I’m fairly certain we’ve all lost our minds.”

  Bubbles chuffed. And then she barked, only the sound didn’t stop. The bark grew into a thunderclap, and the cu siths’ fur began to glow. I hadn’t seen them draw so much power since Stones River, when we’d been victorious over the Destroyer, but we’d paid with Carter and Maggie’s lives.

  Peanut’s booming voice joined Bubbles’s bark, and the cu siths grew into a glowing green comet. I couldn’t hope to match their speed, and neither could the fairies. The thunderous howls became the snarling, gnashing teeth of creatures unhinged.

  “Nixie,” I huffed, unbuckling the belt at my waist.

  She glanced over. “I hardly think this is the time.”

  I laughed and pulled the sheath for the splendorum mortem off my belt before re-securing the Key of the Dead.

  “If something happens, like what happened to the Old Man? Just take care of it.”

  She took the dagger from my hand and frowned before nodding. She hooked the sheath into a heavy latch in the armor on her thigh.

  “It won’t come to that.” She stared at me hard, the light from the cu siths becoming a blinding green sun. “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  We crashed onto the riverfront about the time Bubbles and Peanut crashed into the harbinger.

  “For Cassie!” Angus howled. The fairy shot forward as though he’d been launched from a cannon, his wings tight as a sword lanced out at one of the dark-touched perched on the shoulder of the sentinel.

  The sentinel turned to us, the shadow of one hundred eyes flashing throughout its body, as I came to understand what the sentinel was: one massive creature formed from a platoon of water witches. I slid the focus out after I flipped the pepperbox into my left hand.

  Light bloomed from the side of the harbinger, and I could just make out the shadowy forms of the cu siths inside that light; tearing, biting, and doing enough damage to draw the thing’s attention. The harbinger’s progress stalled, and it turned to face the ever-growing cu siths attached to its side. It swung one mighty claw, but before it crushed the cu siths against its side, Bubbles and Peanut launched off and latched onto its arm, their claws cutting deep furrows into the harbinger’s flesh as they rocketed toward its shoulder.

  Angus circled back to engage another dark-touched, and he wrapped himself around the thing’s neck, stabbing into its eyes over and over. The dark-touched nearest him got a claw in his thigh. The fairy yelped, and then all hell broke loose.

  Two rounds from the surviving tanks cut into the sentinel. Fiery explosions lit the inside of the creature before the water witches scattered. We went from having two enemies facing us to hundreds. The water swelled, and I had little doubt of what was to follow. The undines would create the wave, and if what Nixie had said was true, the queen’s attack would not be so precise. She would scour the city from the face of the earth, leaving only the dead in her wake.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The sentinel disintegrated like a glass sculpture, hammered and splintered. Angus slashed and hacked at the wrist of the dark-touched that had hold of him, eventually breaking free and taking to the air as the vampires all fell into the churning waters below.

  Two of the dark-touched on the harbinger’s shoulder eyed the hovering fairy. Angus was inspecting the wound on his thigh, and I didn’t think he realized what was coming. I raised the pepperbox and fired two incendiary rounds, drawing the attention of the dark-touched, and, unfortunately, the harbinger. That massive Titan refocused on me and strode forward. My immediate goal was accomplished, as the dark-touched had now shifted their focus as well.

  I cursed, watching the waters rise around the harbinger. Two massive green blurs sprinted from one of the harbinger’s shoulders to the other, engaging the dark-touched and hurling them from their mountain-like perch.

  The cu siths were fast, but I worried about their ability to engage the vampires. I didn’t have long to worry, as the rising swell of the water closed on the shore. A small whitecap rose higher than it should have, and had I not been keeping half of my focus on the waters, I wouldn’t have seen the sword flashing out of it.

  “Impadda!”

  The electric blue shield burst into life, redirecting the undine’s strike, and leaving her open to an awkward slash from the soulsword. She howled as the water that formed her body boiled. It wouldn’t do any real damage, but would buy me a few precious seconds.

  The next thing I knew, something wet and heavy had slammed into my side. I crashed onto the muddy shore and scrambled to strike back at whatever had hit me. The undine vanished into the water as I realized I’d been hit by the corpse of a soldier we’d lost earlier in the day. Something howled in the water, and one of the water witches flickered, gray lancing through her body like an intricate webwork. Her sword vanished, and she collapsed into the river.

  I rolled the soldier over and cursed. His bandages had been washed away, but I recognized him as one of the men Aideen and Foster had saved. One of Casper’s, but if he was one of Casper’s … I dug through his pockets, turning up knives and magazines of ammo that might have been useful against a mortal target, but it wasn’t until I checked inside the Velcro pocket on his left breast that I found what I was looking for. My breath still came in ragged bursts, having been knocked away by the impact.

  Another undine lurched out of the water and strode toward me, water dripping from a mass of intricately carved armor. I climbed back up to my hands and knees. I didn’t have an M16 to even try the scavenged rounds with. All I had was a dead man, and a handful of death.

  “Sorry, man,” I said, reaching out to the dead soldier’s aura. I touched him, not expecting a huge flash of knowing. But he’d been dead long enough that I got a stark glimpse into the life of the spy in Casper’s ranks.

  A good friend of Private Stacy, the man who’d tried to shoot me. I drew back in horror as the visions of what this monster had done came to life. Three sexual assault trials, no convictions, no court-martials, no consequences. Two suspicious deaths close to him, and I didn’t need to see more. But there was no way to stop it. One of Casper’s men had been lost on a training mission. This man … this man had lodged the shiv inside his neck. He was good, damn good, at fitting in, at hiding what he w
as. But now he was mine, and he had one last mission. A mission he would have recoiled from in life, and that drew a wicked smile from me.

  I gathered his aura up into my hands, a technique I’d once used to cripple a demon that had come for my sister. Three undines shot out of the river, joining the one on shore.

  “You’ll make a nice statue,” I snarled. I pushed my hands forward, the aura of the traitor stitched into the bullets in my hand. They launched forward, bouncing off the undine’s armor.

  “Fool,” she said. “The full power of the queen’s guard has—”

  I snapped my hands into a fist, forcing the aura deep inside the metal that Mike had worked. It wasn’t nearly dense enough to handle that kind of power, and instead of a handful of bullets, it became an explosion of shrapnel. The undines flickered and screamed and collapsed to the ground, all except for the leader. She caught enough of the blast for the stone dagger fragments to do their work.

  I watched in satisfaction as her face shifted to gray. She would never speak again. A moment later, something with the force of a dump truck plowed into her, sending the rubble of a stony water witch across my field of vision. Bubbles turned and spun in place, looking for her next target. She found the undines on the ground and pounced. If there’d been even a chance the water witches would have survived the blast from the shrapnel, Bubbles made sure they didn’t. Her claws tore into their bodies, separating the long gray stone fragments as she went, and carving up the muddy earth beneath. I wasn’t sure if Bubbles had pulled all the pieces out, or if the witches would recover, but the cu sith pulled at their heads, and whatever she had damaged sent the water witches into oblivion.

  The dark-touched followed, surging from the river as the wave from the sentinel reformed to the north. I glanced to the south at the ruined camp where the guard had lost so many. And I frowned at the spy at my boots. If more of them were left, if more of them still had the ammunition, I might be able to use it.

  “Fall back!” I shouted. “Fall back!”

  Bubbles pounced on one of the dark-touched as it closed on me. She worried at the vampire’s helmet, her massive fangs clanging and screeching at the thing’s head.

  I couldn’t find Nixie, and the thought sent a chill into my bones. Even if she fell, I doubted the queen’s attack would relent. She’d want to make a statement, to utterly destroy Nixie’s allies.

  Almost at that thought, a fountain of water exploded from the center of the river, and I saw Nixie’s form take shape. She reared back, screaming like a mad god as she plunged a stone dagger into the undine wrapped up in her arms. Her attacker turned gray and hard before Nixie smacked the statue of the undine away to shatter on the shore behind her. Nixie looked up at the harbinger, and then her eyes followed the shoreline.

  “Fall back!” I shouted.

  She shook her head and pointed upriver with the stone dagger in her hand. At first, I thought she was just indicating the harbinger, as if we couldn’t leave that thing standing there. And while I agreed, I saw the true threat a moment later.

  * * *

  The tide surged through the river, taller and wider than what had come before. I had no doubt it was scouring buildings from the earth, no doubt that the land where we had fought Drake was being dragged beneath the waves, and the old junkyard, and maybe the bridge itself, had fallen to the queen’s madness. I glanced back at the far bank. We’d never make it in time. The wave would reach us before we could find the stone weapons. And I knew of nothing else that could stop the undines.

  I looked down at the spy at my feet. “Looks like you get to be useful more than once today.”

  Before Zola had taught me to use the power of auras and the basics of line arts, and coalescing a shield, she’d taught me about the truly dark places necromancy had come from. I pulled the Key of the Dead from my belt. The blade was dull, and that would make my work a hell of a lot harder.

  I didn’t have a lot of time, and I knew it was going to be sloppy, but I hoped it would be enough. I smacked the Key of the Dead into the side of the soldier’s head, cutting one sharp line from his earlobe up to the corner of his eye, straight across his eyebrows, and down the other side. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have to be. I needed something to magnify my pull on the dead. I might be able to use the mantle of Anubis to call enough of the gravemakers to me, but it could also get me and everyone else here killed.

  “Did you know the eyes are the windows to the soul?” I asked the corpse as I dug my fingers into the lines on his forehead. “What they don’t tell you is they remain the windows to the soul for hours after you’re dead.” I grunted and gave his face one harsh pull. The flesh had been in the water long enough that it tore away without too much effort, leaving his glassy eyes to stare up at me. I groaned and let the face flop down over his mouth.

  “Gross, man.” I lined the dull dagger up with the corpse’s head chakra, and slammed it home. The knife might have been dull, but that was only in a physical sense. With the eyes of the dead revealed and the chakra points beneath its tip, it slid into the man’s head like a sheath.

  What had been the normal low buzz of Saint Charles’ ghosts and dead became a beacon of power and terror and death. I let the gravemakers rise, closing over the corpse and my hands, circling the Key of the Dead. One thing Zola had always told me about ritual magic was that if I screwed up, it would be a lot more than me that died. I thought back over what I’d done, remembering the lines and patterns, and was fairly certain it was dead on. I hoped.

  Communicating with the gravemakers was a strange feeling. I didn’t think they truly understood words any longer, but they would respond to impressions and magic. In my head, I showed them what the stone dagger looked like, what the shards might look like, and the bullets Mike had forged. For the hell of it, I thought of the Damascus-style blades onto which Mike had melded the stone daggers. If they found one of those laying around, I could sure as hell use it.

  Nixie streamed out of the river, smashing a dark-touched out of the air before it could sink its claws into Bubbles’s neck. A water witch rose behind Nixie, a long gleaming sword ready to strike. But I couldn’t break the spell. I couldn’t risk what that would unleash.

  Peanut roared as his fangs closed over the water witch. They didn’t merely pass through. They cut a section of the witch away, and it did not reform.

  “Good boy,” Nixie said as she tossed the dark-touched to Peanut. The cu sith pounced on the vampire, creating a maelstrom of water and mud and fur. Nixie slammed her sword through the injured undine’s head, and the water witch’s body crunched as it solidified.

  “Whatever you’re doing,” Nixie said, “you’d better do it fast.”

  I knew she was right. The harbinger was only a couple steps away from us, and the massive wave of undines would be on us in seconds. I wanted to tell Nixie to run, but if this didn’t work, we were all dead anyway. I opened the floodgates inside my head and let the souls come screaming out, tearing through the Key of the Dead, and channeling their way down into the gravemakers. If anything good had come of those millions of voices inside my head. It was that they seemed to have agreed on one unifying purpose. The extermination of Nudd.

  The visions and flashes of terror that entered my mind as those souls flowed to the gravemakers and wrapped their way around the corpses of the fallen soldiers, destroyed my ability to do anything but fight to stay conscious. My vision dimmed into a soundless gray tunnel. The roar of grief and the dying echoed through my mind. Until one voice cut through. The voice of the child who would have been the Destroyer. The voice of the child who would die if I died.

  The scream that came from my mouth was not that of a mortal. It was something else, twisted and burned and tortured. But it was not alone. It came with friends.

  Once a powerful-enough magic was summoned, it was as much instinct as it was skill to control it. And if you ever summoned something beyond your skill, good luck. The idea in my head was already formed. I’d do
ne it before. But this was different. The undines were faster. I couldn’t anchor them to one spot and expect them to stand still while I impaled them.

  But the idea was the same. Someone grabbed my shoulders, and I realized it was Nixie. Saying goodbye?

  “Not. Dead. Yet.”

  Pillars of the dead exploded from the river. They tore through the parking lot up on the shore, blasted a hole through Main Street, and one cracked the harbinger hard enough in the chin to send it stumbling backward and crashing down into the wave behind it.

  “Now.”

  The wave reached the nearby pillars as that terrible webwork of brambles and spikes exploded from the towers. Only it wasn’t the same thing that I’d used in the past. The gravemakers had picked up every bit of the stone dagger material they’d encountered. Now they wielded those fragments with deadly purpose.

  With the souls inside, those towers took on a sentience of their own. All I had to do was feed them energy to continue. The waves crashed into the brambles, and the brambles erupted into a cluster of thorns. I yanked the dagger out of the spy’s skull before I wrapped my arms around Nixie and shouted, “Get us out of here!”

  She started to run, and I looked back at the crashing wave and the flickering veins of stone and gravemaker inside of it. I was horrified to see it was still attacking the undines even after I had broken my connection with the Key of the Dead. But the undines crashed to the earth, some of them hit by enough of the stone dagger shards that their bodies shattered and were no more.

  A series of booming barks sounded behind us, and I stretched my neck to see Bubbles and Peanut charging after us. The pony-sized cu siths looked more like grizzly bears, massive lumbering forms with the speed of a horse. Peanut flipped me and Nixie up into the air. Nixie yelped before we crashed onto Bubbles’s back, one of us clinging to either side while Peanut charged along beside us.