by Eric Asher
I stared in awful fascination as a webwork of red and black raced up the fairy’s legs and spiraled around his head. The knight tried to cut it away, cutting so deep as to remove half his own face before the red tendrils flashed brightly, and the fairy collapsed.
Hern backed away from whatever Zola had conjured as it sprinted through his ranks and closed on the antlered form itself, leaving a trail of self-mutilated, dying Fae behind it.
With every step, Zola’s creature changed, morphed into something different with each Fae it touched, with each Fae that died screaming when the bloody gelatin mold brushed it. It was bigger by the time it reached Hern, more sure of its footing as it plunged through an unwary mass of lampreys. The tangled figure collapsed, dead.
Hern was not such easy prey. He gestured at the creature, and pale yellow light exploded from his fingers, cutting through Zola’s summoning. Steam rose and hissed from the split body as it still tried to flop its way to Hern. The Fae lord grimaced as he drew his ax. The strike was swift, and the creature moved no more.
But the damage had been done. The veil of darkness that had been stretched across the bunker had decidedly bright spots now. The dragons had burned through the edges of Hern’s power even as Zola’s creature had slaughtered its way into the heart of Nudd’s army.
There were still too many left. Another skeleton struck down the horseman at my command. Though I still had control of it, the rider could no longer support its own weight. It crumbled to the ground as a dark-touched vampire flickered through Hern’s ranks, crushing the horse’s skeleton beside its fallen rider.
Dominic and Jonathan pounced, engaging the dark-touched vampire as it laughed and deflected the blows from their swords. They moved faster and faster until little more than the violent arcs of their flaming blades were clear in the chaos.
Jasper dove toward us. Vicky raised a soulsword in her right hand as the dragon cleared my head by inches. I spun to follow them, realizing then that the veil had surrounded us, the edges having seeped through the bunker and filled the space behind us, cutting us off from Appalachia. And with the veil came … things.
This isn’t Hern’s magic. A tangle of tentacles writhed and flopped its way forward into the bunker.
“The veil is a doorway,” Zola said, drawing my attention back to her. She brushed her braids back from a haggard face, took a deep breath, and straightened her back. Whatever the summoning was that she’d done, it had taken a great deal of energy.
“Since when can Hern summon something from the Abyss?”
Aideen hit the ground beside us, hard. She grunted, rolled over, and came up to one knee. “Never.” Another healing spell flashed from her fingers, cutting down a horseman as it trampled the armor of its fallen comrades. “Nudd’s done something to his power. I’m sure of it.”
The closest of the tentacles lashed out, reaching for Zola, but Drake had seen what came through the gateway. He dove in Vicky’s wake, his dragon unhinging its jaws as the leviathan came fully into our realm. A torrent of blue flame engulfed the end of the tentacle. It curled back, blackened and cracked and oozing as the undamaged tentacles spread out, revealing a gaping maw of three beaks within the slimy flesh.
I’d seen Jasper beat a leviathan before, but here, in the bunker I feared what would happen if the dragons tried to incinerate the creature in earnest. The nukes might not go off, but I was guessing it wouldn’t be a good thing to be in the same room if the radioactive material in those warheads was exposed. Plus, rockets.
I cursed. “Zola! They didn’t just choose this bunker for the warheads. They’re limiting our strongest allies.”
“Ah know, boy. Ah know. Now get over it and fight!” Light and death burst from Zola’s knobby old cane, a laser-focused fire incantation that punched through flesh and armor alike. Fae fell in the path of that power, but it wasn’t the kind of thing Zola could keep using. She was already slowing from her summoning, and the more powerful incantations would exhaust anyone in short order.
They’d handicapped all of us in the bunker. I couldn’t conjure the pillars of the dead to spear Hern’s army. If I pulled too hard on the structure around us, I could kill everyone. That would have been a neat trick if we weren’t locked inside with Hern’s hellish forces. If it came to it … I could do it. I could bring the bunker down. But that was a last resort.
Instead, I called on the gravemakers to rise. With care and patience and more caution than I normally exerted, I let the dead flow from the earth beneath my feet. The blackened bark-like flesh rolled up my legs, caressing my torso as it slid over my chest and down my arms. I could feel the desire in the gravemakers. The urge to kill, the urge to smother the one who dared order them. But we shared an enemy, and whatever animated Hern’s army drew the ire of the gravemakers.
We moved as one, though I had to expend a great deal of focus to keep the gravemakers away from my face. Whatever had happened when we battled the dark-touched in the prison, I didn’t want it happening here.
Swords clanged, and metal slurped greedily at the blood left behind by rent flesh. For a time, the world around us vanished. There was only the enemy, and the world of the commoners we were fighting to preserve. Hern sent wave after wave to crash against us. They all died. But they did damage of their own.
The vampire, Jonathan, lay unmoving on the ground behind Dominic. Drake’s dragon bled liquid metal from its tail. But still the beast hammered away at the leviathan, beating back a foe that would otherwise have long ago crushed us beneath its massive tentacles.
The shadows of the bunker still flowed from Hern’s back like some damned cloak, spewing horsemen, lampreys, and more of the possessed Fae. The chaos of the battle echoed through the giant room, making it sound like things were right beside you when they were far away, and far away when something was about to slit your throat.
I didn’t dare risk summoning the pillars of the dead, but the Hand of Anubis did well enough for my needs. Two of the Fae lay flattened to the stone, their bodies screaming as they disintegrated, never knowing what had come from the earth to crush them. But for Jonathan, I took a softer touch, more concentration. Instead of the jagged and cracked bark, a sleek obsidian hand slipped through the fractures of the stone, dragging the vampire back toward Zola and Aideen until he rested at the healer’s feet.
“I can’t heal him!” Aideen shouted. “He’s not like Sam!”
“Just feed something to him,” I barked back, my voice gruff and changed by the layer of gravemakers flowing around me.
Zola laughed as Aideen grumbled, spearing the nearest Fae and slamming it down on top of Jonathan. I worried he wasn’t conscious, or at least not aware enough of his surroundings, but his arms closed around the fairy like a bear trap. Blood sprayed. I didn’t watch the rest.
I stalked forward, grabbing, crushing, and hurling our foes into the jaws of the leviathan. Hern hadn’t expected that. I grinned, madness at the edges of my mind as Nudd’s right hand backed away.
The voices came to me as I teetered on the brink. Seductive things, whispering to me. “Give in to the power. Be consumed by it so that you might consume our enemy. I could silence them most times, even when the world was quiet, but this was different. The souls from Gettysburg knew who Hern was, sensed the exhaustion in my bones, understood Hern’s tie to Nudd, and they screamed for the death of the old hunter.
I stumbled as I crushed one of the horsemen in a Hand of Anubis. I couldn’t stop fighting. If any one of us stopped now, every one of us died.
Foster spun toward me after Hern turned away another attack. The fairy’s eyes widened, and he shouted, “Nudd’s balls!”
I swatted a pile of bones away and turned to see Jasper, wings flexing and Vicky riding upon his back, hauling the leviathan into what limited airspace he had to work with. The dragon spun, and the churning mass of tentacles and beaks sailed into the oncoming line of dark-touched vampires.
Whatever the leviathans were, they were no friend of the
dark-touched. Two of the vampires vanished into the leviathan’s maw before they could so much as react. I half expected them to tear out the sides of the writhing mass, but it didn’t happen. The leviathan had devoured them.
Unfortunately, the mass of tentacles and beaks didn’t seem to care that several dark-touched had escaped. Instead, it was content to smash through the lines of skeletons, almost as if it was making for Hern. But the illusion was shattered when one of those tentacles snatched Drake from the back of his dragon.
The fairy shouted. And I didn’t have to imagine why. I’d seen the tentacles of the leviathans up close before. Inside each was a savage hook, and I had little doubt that some of them had found purchase in Drake’s armor, and others anchored themselves in his flesh. A smaller, faster tentacle wrapped around the dragon like a noose, dragging both the shouting fairy and the bellowing reptile closer to the beak-filled maw.
I moved toward Drake, the flesh of the gravemakers slowing every stride. Another of the dark-touched angled to intercept me. I almost yearned for the vampires we’d fought in Greenville. For these were smarter, and while they may not have been faster, that intelligence allowed them to avoid the deadliest of our attacks.
A Hand of Anubis missed one of the vampires, but I managed to let it fall backward and knock another away. All the time, Drake was getting pulled closer to the beak of the leviathan. At first, I thought he was still fighting, trying to throw spell. But now I could see the leviathan had wrapped another tentacle around Drake’s head, and the fairy could do little more than writhe.
Vicky dove for the writhing ball of tentacles. I watched helplessly as she vanished into the deadly mass. Awe swept over me as her hand reached up and grabbed Jasper’s tail, and the dragon became a blazing blue sword. Fire rippled and licked out in deep hues, and the blade made short work of the leviathan’s tentacles.
I was close enough to call a Hand of Anubis up between the beaks and Drake. I curled the hand gently over the fairy, stumping the leviathan for a moment. But a moment was all Vicky needed. She spun like a whirlwind through blood and ichor. With each slash of the dragon-born blade, another piece of tentacle fell. Another part of the leviathan died. Until finally she hurled that flaming blue mass at the giant black orb of the leviathan’s eye.
A giant gray lid closed as the light reached it, and the leviathan turned away just enough to preserve its eye. As the sword bounced away, Jasper exploded into his dragon form once more. The leviathan’s attention was fully on the dragon now, giving Vicky time to drag Drake back to the relative safety of our party.
The distraction allowed Drake’s dragon to free himself. It lashed out, its tail denting the core of the leviathan before it fled, and the dragon followed Vicky back to us.
“I can fight!” Dominic snapped, pushing Jonathan away from him. I could see a flash of white bone in Dominic’s left arm. He wasn’t moving well.
“You’re no good to us dead,” Jonathan shouted before plunging back into a ferocious exchange with a dark-touched vampire.
“We’re only holding the line,” Zola said, standing on top of the gravemaker flesh that oozed out of the earth around me. “We have to change the tide.”
“Come on!” Vicky said, igniting another soulsword as she sprinted past us. Jasper followed her, and the metallic blood and scars on his tail perhaps told me more about how much shit we were in than anything else had. I’d never seen the dragon go more than a minute or two without healing himself. The fact he hadn’t couldn’t be good.
Pain, white hot and merciless, lanced through my right side. I folded, almost crumpling in half as I stared in confusion at the feathers sticking out of my side. They glowed like the eyes of the possessed Fae. I looked up in time to see the next volley, a line of archers behind Hern. The bastard wore a smug smile. He wasn’t worried at all. He was toying with us.
“Impadda!” I growled as the incantation snapped up around me. Sparks and electric blue light exploded as the arrows shattered and bounced off in various directions. Lightning gathered above one of the arches, lancing down to meet his bow.
Zola snarled, stepped around the shield, and raised her staff. “Tyranno Eversiotto!” A lightning storm of her own making carved a deadly path through the stone floor, cutting a rocket in half before obliterating the arch. Electric blue light vanished as a fireball erupted from the severed rocket.
I shouted the first incantation that came to mind, even if it wasn’t the smartest. “Magnus Glaciatto!”
A hailstorm of water, frozen into dagger-like projectiles, stormed across the battlefield. It cut through the fireball, and Fae screamed as they were cut down, or burned up. The orange and red smoke billowed out along the ceiling of the bunker and cast an unsettling light on everything around us.
“Enough!” Hern’s voice broke through the shadows, and his power split the flames as he strode toward us. “Surrender now so that you may hear Nudd’s offer!”
I gritted my teeth and snapped the arrow off where it stuck out from my back. The pain was unlike anything I’d felt before, and the flesh of the gravemakers burned against the open wounds like a brick of salt. I jerked my hand into a fist, and a spike of gravemaker flesh erupted from the ground in front of Hern. It wasn’t as lethal as the pillars, but it could do some damage.
The antlered god stared down at his torso, now impaled on a spike nearly half a foot in diameter. He studied it for a moment, before simply walking forward and snapping the spike off. The gravemakers reeled, and I staggered backward a step at their pain. I’d never been connected to them when something managed to injure them. It was a thousand fingernails on a blackboard that tore through my mind at once. A screaming pain from something that should feel nothing, a vicious burn that inflicted more torment in a single moment than getting shot with that damned arrow had. It was all I could do to stay on my feet, but I had no illusions that I looked wobbly as hell.
Whatever Hern was, he was more of a threat than I’d given him credit for.
“Surrender yourselves and be spared.” Hern’s words were steady and clear. I didn’t sense irony in them, or the deception I was sure waited within. “It would be senseless to waste such fine soldiers.”
Foster righted himself as he drew his sword from the gut of a wounded Fae. A quick slash to the throat, and the fairy disintegrated in a horrible wailing scream. Foster held his sword firm in his right hand and stared defiantly at Hern. His voice raged, torn between absolute anger and something far closer to despair. “You’ve betrayed everything you are! Millenia spent serving the Mad King, masking the truth of who he is, of what he’s done! It is better to die free than serve as a vessel for the rot that lives inside your king.”
Jonathan stood beside Foster, his own sword’s flame surging, as if reaching out for the blood of Hern.
“Will none of you join us?” Hern said. “None will join the new glory of the Wild Hunt? A glory I have rebuilt, made better, made great once more?”
We stood silent. Jonathan sneered at the old Fae god and spat upon the stone.
“Then you die.” Hern’s sword was suddenly through Jonathan’s chest. Blood poured from the vampire’s mouth as he tried to free himself.
“No!” Dominic screamed.
Jonathan looked up, eyes wide, the surprise plain on his face. He reached for Dominic before he slumped to the side. The last garbled words on his lips were “Kill Vassili … Alexi …”
“Now,” Hern started, but a screaming ball of brilliant rage slammed into him a second later. Vicky, stabbing, slicing, and spinning as her soulswords cut a gory path into the Fae’s chest. Hern stumbled backward, the shock on his face so profound it would have been comical in almost any other situation.
A shadow of darkness flowed from Hern’s shoulder, tried to surround Vicky, but the air around her ignited into blue flame as Jasper exploded off her shoulder. The dragon chewed away the darkness, burned it, tore it, until the magic died, and all that was left was an ancient tattered cloak on the bloody
stone floor.
Vicky’s breath came slow and hard as she rebounded off Hern and stalked toward him once more.
“Get back!” Drake cried out, leaping onto his dragon as they made for Hern.
I thought it had been a warning that he was about to burn Hern off the face of the earth, but Hern spread his arms wide, and a skeletal deer charged out of the shadows. Its antlers were like daggers, sharpened and gleaming on their broad rack as the deer lowered its head.
Jasper dove toward Vicky, but more shadows swarmed the dragon. He screeched as one of the leviathan’s tentacles managed to snatch him from the air. A shower of blue fire erupted behind a missile, casting the choking clouds and smoke into a sickening blue and orange light.
“You are magnificent, child,” Hern’s shaky voice announced. “But you are too great a threat to live.”
Drake’s sword lashed out at the air in front of him. A red wound opened in reality before snapping closed, devouring him and his dragon.
I called a Hand of Anubis, raising it between Vicky and the stag, but the antlers pierced the gravemakers, scattering them to the four winds with one vicious toss of the stag’s head. I barely recognized the agonized shout that rose from my throat at both the pain of being struck, and the realization of how helpless we were in that place.
Another of Drake’s portals opened, and a ball of fire preceded the return of his dragon. Drake followed, directly in front of Vicky. The dragon crashed into the stag, claws and antlers slicing and gouging. They both bled, but the stag didn’t stop. It scored a hit on the dragon’s rear flank, and the reptilian leg collapsed as whatever muscles were in that form took the brunt of the hit.
The antler tore free of the dragon as Drake raised a shield. An explosion of blue light blinded us all as the crash of the impact of those two powers threatened to deafen us. Drake leaned into the shield, fires licking up around the edges.
Drake cried out between gritted teeth. “The neck, behind the skull!”
