Vesik Series Boxset Book 3

by Eric Asher

  “Always.”

  Park frowned. “We have our mission, and you have yours. Best of luck to you all.” With that, he spun on his heel and returned to the stairs that would take him into the underground halls. He paused before vanishing down the steps. “I’m sorry.” His footsteps faded as he descended the stairs.

  Casper hung back for a moment. “He didn’t know what they were going to do. You need to believe that. None of us did. If I had …” The muscles in her jaw flexed.

  “Someone did,” I said. “But I believe you. Find out who orchestrated it.” I let my gaze trail back to where Park had vanished. “He may not have known ahead of time, but he knows now.”

  Casper nodded. She looked down at Vicky and said, “Keep them out of trouble, yeah?”

  Vicky bit her lip. “I’m probably not the best person to ask for that.”

  Casper blinked at the girl and then followed in Park’s footsteps.

  “I’ll go with Gaia,” I said. I wanted to walk with the Titan, but I also wanted to avoid the nausea-inducing thrill ride of the Warded Ways. “Where will you exit the Ways?”

  Aideen glanced down as if she was studying the weave of Zola’s cloak in order to determine just where they would come out of the Warded Ways. “I believe we can reach the guard room from the old church. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Good,” I said. “So, no randomly appearing in front of a wandering dullahan today, right?”

  “Probably not?” Aideen said, her voice rising.

  I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t instill much confidence.”

  “Just be ready for anything. If Nudd’s press conference was a lure, gods only know what we’re walking into.”

  “Would they not have contacted you?” Zola asked.

  “They should have,” Aideen said. “But today has been an odd day.”

  “You have a gift for understatement,” Zola said. She turned and started toward the main entrance of the archives. “Enough talk. We move.”

  “See you there,” I said, fishing around in my backpack. My fingers brushed the cold dead flesh of Gaia’s hand. I laced her fingers between my own and stepped into the Abyss.

  * * *

  “It is not usual for me to see you so many times in one day,” Gaia said as she materialized beside me. The motes of her golden light outshone the stars of the Abyss in the distance.

  “And we’re probably not done,” I said. “I need to get to Falias. Just outside the Obsidian Inn. Preferably by the guard room, if you can do that.”

  Gaia frowned. “I know the room of which you speak, but it is warded against many magicks.” Her musical voice was both soothing and a stark reminder of where we were. “While I may be able to get you into that room, I do not know if you would survive the experience.”

  I groaned. “What about the old courtyard? With the basilisk skeleton? That’s close enough to the entrance that I probably won’t die.”

  “Your standards for travel have decreased somewhat of late.”

  “Was that a joke? I’m not sure how to take that, Gaia.”

  “I can bring you to the courtyard of which you speak. There are many more beings gathered near the eastern edge of the city. Would you not prefer to go there?”

  I shook my head. “We need to talk to the Inn. Nudd is making a move, but we’re not entirely sure what it is.”

  Gaia pondered those words, her gaze trailing off toward the dim horizon before returning to me. “I have sensed the fear in the humans. A panic rose like I have not felt since Falias, and for nearly a century before that, the last time one of the great wars scoured their world.”

  “You can sense that from here?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Gaia said. “My body still rests upon the earth. It is only my consciousness that roams this place, and a segment of my power.”

  “And your hand.”

  Gaia gave me a flat look.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought we were making jokes.”

  “Indeed.”

  A far-off sound rose, the deathly silence of the Abyss fractured by a basso roar like that of a rising earthquake.

  Gaia stared into the distance and frowned. “Some of the old ones have been stirring.”

  “Why? It’s not like they can escape this place.”

  “Perhaps not,” Gaia said. “But that does not mean they cannot be released. We are here.”

  “Thank you. You’ll probably see me again shortly. I don’t think this meeting will take long.”

  “Ready yourself, Damian Vesik, for you are not alone.”

  I had a split second to wonder what in the hell Gaia was talking about before the Abyss tilted into a violent spiral and I fell.

  * * *

  The disorienting blur of my trip back to earth was blissfully smooth. Sunlight nearly blinded me as the darkness of the Abyss vanished, and I was left stumbling beside the massive skull of the long-dead basilisk. It was a good thing Gaia’s aim had been good, or I might have been impaled on one of its massive fangs.

  “That would’ve sucked,” I muttered, trying to orient myself.

  Something crunched beside me, and I frowned as I turned toward the noise, backpedaling as I gazed at the hooded form. A helmet beneath the cloth hid flesh that would burn in the daylight. I fumbled in my backpack cursing at myself for not drawing the focus before stepping into the Abyss.

  “Vesik,” the gravelly voice boomed.

  My fingers wrapped around the butt of the pepperbox and I drew the gun while my other hand fumbled awkwardly for the focus. It was only then that I realized what had snapped. The dark-touched held an Utukku in his claws, her neck snapping and crunching as his red right hand crushed it into a pulp.

  “Vesik is here!” The dark-touched vampire screamed in his gravelly voice.

  “You can talk?” I said, a split second before I started pulling the trigger on the pepperbox. Bullets whined and ricocheted as they cracked against the dark-touched’s helmet. More of my light blindness faded, and I began to understand just how not alone I was. A few piles of clothes were tangled up in Faerie armor, and the corpse of more than one dark-touched lay amid the wreckage of three Utukku bodies.

  “Goddammit,” I snarled, holstered the pepperbox, and held my hand out as the dark-touched who had spoken charged.

  “Tyranno Eversiotto!” I screamed the incantation. The ley lines snapped through me as the hairs on my arms stood at attention before electric blue lightning scoured the earth in front of me. The bolt cut through the stone beneath my feet and ripped its way to the vampire. What had been an uncomfortable distance of 30 feet had closed to half that in the blink of an eye. The lightning met him about ten feet out, the explosion rocking me back on my heels. I dropped the incantation when I realized I’d singed the hair on my forearms.

  Movement caught my eye. Distant, but not for long. Cloaked figures flew across the rooftops and slid down the slender spires of Falias. Far more vampires than I could hope to fend off by myself. And what patrol had been here—the usual ten-member mixture of Utukku and Fae—were either dead or broken and running. They had the right idea.

  I didn’t hesitate as the dark-touched at my feet groaned. I ran. Slipping into the shadows of the nearest alleyway, I cringed as the visceral cries of the dark-touched followed me down out of the light. I’d only been here once before, when Ward—or was it the Old Man—had shown us the basilisk. There wasn’t much doubt I was moving in the general direction of the Obsidian Inn, but I didn’t know if the alley would lead me to a haven, or a trap.

  I sprinted toward what looked to be a dead-end, and my heart hammered as something scrambled over the brick above me. To my left was an archway, and I dove through it. I turned as I fell and shouted, “Modus Ignatto!” A torrent of fire, unrefined but massive, belched from my hand and splattered out into the alley. I didn’t stop to see what it had done. I scrambled back to my feet and sprinted through the rest of the arched alley. As soon as I broke into the daylight, I jaunted to
the right and ran hard until the burning of my lungs threatened to send me to the ground.

  “Here,” a female voice hissed.

  It was either a trap, or help. But in my escape, I’d managed to grasp the focus. If it was a trap, I had a much better chance of surviving it. The golden stone of a half-collapsed building revealed only a sliver of shadow, but again the voice said, “Here.”

  The dark-touched bellowed above me. I risked a glimpse backward, and I saw nothing above me or behind me. I slipped into the shadowed space and squinted at a distant light.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  “Nudd happened,” a whisper said. “Too many of us went to the gate. Fools.”

  “Morrigan?” I said, fairly certain I recognized the snide tone in the word “fools.”

  “Yes. Now, come. We must return to the Inn.” She started through the hall toward the light. It only took a moment before I realized we were headed down a gradual slope.

  “Where are Foster and the others?” Morrigan asked.

  “Foster’s in jail, along with my sister, but Aideen’s on her way. She has Zola and Vicky with her.”

  “The Destroyer?” Morrigan asked.

  “She’s not the Destroyer anymore.”

  “Yes, yes, you humans and your semantics. Is she still bonded to the reaper?”

  “Jasper?” I asked as we reached the torch that I’d seen from the start of the passageway. “Yes, I asked him to guard her. To keep her safe.”

  Morrigan slid the torch off the wall and led the way to a staircase that vanished into shadows as dark as the Abyss.

  “Good,” Morrigan said. “We may need a reaper of our own before this day is done.”

  “Who else is here?”

  “Some of the Utukku. At least those that are left alive. Hess remained at the armory with a few of her most loyal soldiers. This is my fault. I never should’ve sent that family to infiltrate Nudd’s ranks.”

  “I doubt you forced them into it,” I said, remembering the fear on Liam, Lachlan, and Enda’s faces when we’d met them in the catacombs. “They’re fed up with Nudd.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Morrigan said. “Aren’t we all.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We continued farther down the darkened halls, Morrigan in her crone form. I could have mistaken her silhouette for Zola in the shadows and the wavering torchlight. It felt like we had been walking for an hour, but I knew that couldn’t be right. Time hadn’t truly slowed. Quiet scratches and distant thumps echoed around us in the musty air. My gaze shot toward every shadow that moved or shifted in the distance.

  It was impossible to lock down my senses in their entirety when I was this stressed. Impossible to ignore the floating gray orbs of long-forgotten guardians in this place. Morrigan glanced back at me and hesitated.

  “You sense more than I expected.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She gestured at a cluster of the gray orbs that seem to flit through her hand and out of my field of vision. “The old ones. Those who once lived, but do no more, whose purpose is not forgotten.” Morrigan studied me for a moment before glancing at the ceiling as something thundered overhead.

  “Are we close?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Morrigan focused on corridor ahead of us. A rumble built in volume, and I didn’t think it was outside the tunnel this time. Morrigan exhaled. “I’d hoped to avoid this.”

  She hurried forward, and I followed.

  I lowered my voice. “Avoid what?”

  “Nudd has sent all manner of Unseelie Fae into the tunnels, hunting for the Obsidian Inn.”

  “Why doesn’t he just send the dark-touched down here? This is practically their natural habitat.”

  “He tried. They perished. The dullahan has called more than one name in these corridors, and the dangers that lurk here are powerful protections for the Inn. I have known Nudd ten times longer than Zola has been alive. He will not stop so easily. It is only a matter of time before he sends less … stable things down here.”

  We turned the corner, and I frowned at the hallway. I thought I recognized it, the place where I’d once appeared below Falias. A place of cells and violence, and the charred brick on the walls told me I was right. But Morrigan had been right, too. We weren’t alone.

  In the distance, two blue orbs floated together as if they were weightless fire.

  “Dullahan,” I said, my hand reaching for the focus at my belt.

  “It’s not the dullahan you should be worried about, boy,” Morrigan snapped. “We make for the stairs. Don’t hesitate to kill anything between us and our goal. Go now!”

  Morrigan broke into a sprint. My focus was still on the distant floating eyes of the dullahan, as I remembered what a monster that creature could be on the battlefield.

  I finally saw it about the time the intersection appeared, the crossroads with the stairs to the Obsidian Inn. At first, the mass appeared to be a wall of snakes, surging out from one of the cells and splattering against the far wall. But instead of a wet thump, the shadowy forms cracked into the very stone. Among the undulating mass of slithering things, I heard the fall of rock and metal clattering across the floor.

  I tried to concentrate on my footing, careful not to twist an ankle, as we attempted to outrun the massive shadows. A moment later, the dullahan’s eyes disappeared in the distance, and those snakelike forms broke into a halo of light. As they crossed through, I could see they were caked in mud, blood, and other viscera I couldn’t identify. One thing I was sure of: they weren’t snakes.

  “What the fuck is that?” I shouted.

  Morrigan glowed. Between one step and the next, the crone became the raven, and she rocketed forward on oily black wings. “Burn them!” the bird squawked.

  Throwing an incantation while running was a sure way to miss your target. But one thing Zola had taught me was if you threw a large-enough ball of fire in an enclosed space, you didn’t really need to aim. “Magnus Ignatto!”

  I stumbled as the power ripped through me. I felt what was left of the hairs on my arms burn to a crisp. Morrigan, almost distant now, made the turn through the intersection and flew up the stairs. She’d be safe from the heat, though I wasn’t sure if she was susceptible to fire incantations. The chaotic wall of flame shot forward at irregular intervals until it crashed into the writhing mass of what now looked very much like lampreys or dying gray vines draped in gore and dripping blood I suspected was from our allies.

  Whatever they were, they were sentient. The instant the flames hit and widened to the point that I couldn’t see down the hallway through the fire and pain in my arms, something else screamed. It wasn’t immediately recognizable as pain, as the sound was so deep and basso it took me a moment to understand the earth wasn’t shaking around me. I let the fires die away and gasped for breath as I stumbled forward, making my way for the staircase as the soles of my boots sizzled on the superheated stone beneath them.

  The fire faded, but it took time. I closed on the staircase that would let me climb to salvation. But even as the fires died, revealing the charred tentacles of roots and flesh and whatever else that thing had dragged down here, the snakelike vines moved again. Perhaps it was an illusion that they stuttered and stopped and restarted, but I liked to think they were injured.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t kill me in a heartbeat.

  A roar sounded in earnest, but this time it was a roar I knew. A wall of gray exploded in front of me. The long tail of a lizard that shouldn’t exist stretched out from the mass as four enormous legs materialized beneath it with a whumph. Ash and debris flew up from beneath Jasper’s massive wings. He reared back, unhinged his jaw, and a hellish blue flame exploded from his mouth. I dove behind the dragon, taking shelter by one of his hind legs. I sagged against him as the air thinned, and I felt like my lungs would catch fire at any moment. But they didn’t, and the flames receded, and the gray flesh moved no more. For a time. Then Jasper shrank, staying l
arge enough for me to lean against, but losing the sheer level of intimidation he had as a full-sized dragon.

  I was making the turn into the intersection when the smoke cleared to little more than wisps of gray, allowing me to see the eyes of the dullahan, still watching in the distance. As I looked back, I caught movement. The charred flesh flicked away, and the creature raced toward a cell before a voice boomed through the halls.

  “Dragon fire?” the thing said. “Who walks these halls? Who dares interrupt my hunt for the Abyss creature?”

  Exhaustion settled into my bones, but I stood my ground. I patted Jasper on the head and kept one foot on the first step that would lead to safety. Unless this thing was faster than I’d seen so far, I could still escape. Curiosity had its claws in me.

  A hunched form swept through one of the cells as a tangle of vines and wood retreated toward a shadowed form. It stepped forward into the edge of the torchlight that had been ignited by Jasper, or me.

  My breath hitched as I stared at the bark-covered face and the jagged openings of the glowing green eyes. Its mouth was little more than a serrated break in the bark it wore like armor.

  “You?” I said. “I saw you in Greenville. What are you doing here?”

  The being froze. Its face shifted, and the bark almost seemed to frown.

  “Speak carefully,” Morrigan said from the top of the stairs. “The forest gods are powerful.”

  I frowned. “Forest gods?”

  “You have met others of my kind,” the creature said extending a hand, palm open before curling into a fist. It was formed of tightly knit vines, and some of them appeared to be charred. “There are not so many of us as there once were. Where is this Greenville of which you speak?”

  “Missouri.”

  “The war-torn lands,” the creature said, her words trailing off as if lost in thought. “I have family in that place. Though some are not so benevolent.”

  “Like the green men?” I asked.

  The treelike face swayed toward one wall and then the other between releasing what I can only think of as a scratchy laugh. “The green men are followers, for we are their gods.”