by Charley Case
Her scalp tingled at the idea.
Yaminah was suddenly in her face. Mila, distracted by the pull of the storm, hadn’t noticed her charge, and she was almost too late to dodge a slash at her throat.
As she leaned back, the short wall at the roof’s edge digging into the small of her back, Mila was able to get just out of reach. She kicked out, but Yaminah caught her foot, and to Mila’s horror, used its momentum to lift her up and over the wall.
Mila dropped her weapons and scrambled to catch hold of the edge of the roof as her body slammed into the outside wall and her feet dangled three stories up.
Above her, she saw the disappointed face of Yaminah looking down at her, the black dagger in her hand, poised over Mila’s fingers.
“I thought you were better than that.” The hard woman tossed her long single braid over her shoulder.
Mila heard the words, but she couldn’t focus on Yaminah since the lightning mesmerized her. She felt as if the storm was alive and calling to her. It wanted her to intercede for it. It desperately wanted to connect the heavens and the Earth.
“I hoped you were better than that.” Yaminah sounded sorrowful as she brought the knife down to chop Mila’s fingers off and drop her from the roof.
Mila didn’t feel fear, she felt sorrow—sorrow for those that would stand against her. Sorrow that she couldn’t save everyone. Sorrow for Yaminah and the bad life choices that had led her to her destruction.
Something at the base of Mila’s skull snapped open and a flood of power rushed into her. Suddenly the lightning wasn’t all the way up in the clouds out of her reach, it lay in her hand. She just needed to command it.
She did.
A white spear of pure energy lanced down from the clouds, crackled its way joyously to the Earth, and enveloped Yaminah, outlining her body in blinding white light as it crashed down to drive its power into the building.
The bolt retreated as fast as it had come and thunder followed, a physically painful sound that tore at Mila’s senses, making her ears ring and her vision blur.
The wall she hung onto felt warm under her fingers.
With a little effort, Mila pulled herself over the wall to take in the aftermath of what she had done. The deck boards for ten feet in every direction of the lightning strike had been turned to smoke. A dozen thralls scattered across the charred wood bits had obviously been caught in the strike.
Luckily, her weapons were made of sturdier stuff than the deck and had survived without a scratch. She bent down to retrieve Gram and the Ivar and brushed a few wood chips from the pistol’s handle.
When she looked up, Mila realized everyone on the roof was staring at her. Even Missy and Victoria, although their expressions were far different. Victoria had a look of awe, and Missy had a look of disgusted horror.
The remaining two dozen thralls had been knocked down by the blast but quickly scrambled to their feet and charged at Carl’s team, which opened fire once again. The only two Rougarou left crouched on the floor and held their sensitive ears. Nick and Remmy moved to make quick work of them.
“Well, that was something.” Mila scratched her scalp, then walked toward them with slightly drunken steps.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Are you done?” Mila called to Missy, nearly tripping on a dead thrall.
Missy sneered. “I don't think you understand what’s at stake here, child. This is not something I can just walk away from, not anymore.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Mila said, her eyes narrowing as she called down a second lightning strike, blasting the spot where Missy stood.
Blinding light and a terrible ripping thunder blasted boards to splinters.
The thing at the back of Mila’s skull cracked open further, and more power flooded into her.
She called down another bolt, slamming it into the same spot again. This one was twice the size of the first two.
The windows of the surrounding buildings exploded, showering glass to the streets for a block in every direction.
Like a dam giving way, the thing in her skull was overrun, all blockage washed away in a torrent of celestial magic.
Mila had no clue what was happening, but she knew whatever it was, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. She felt like that guy who levels up in a video game, skipping ahead but unprepared for the next enemies because he doesn't have the right equipment.
The light of the second strike faded, revealing Missy standing tall, her silver longsword planted in the deck and a glowing golden shield surrounding her.
“You shouldn't be able to do that, child,” the blue-haired woman said smugly.
“Fuck you?”
“No thanks, but you did show me yours; perhaps it’s time I show you mine.” She smirked, stabbing her sword into the wood and letting go, using the deck as a holder.
Missy’s brow furrowed with heated concentration. Her body began to glow with golden light. It pulsed and grew in intensity, becoming brightest at the center of her chest. Then a black speck appeared in the swirling golden light, and sweat sprang up out her brow.
Small, thin root-like structures started to spread from the dark spot. Wherever the roots reached, the light dimmed but also took on a violet color. Missy’s expression changed from concentration to pain, but she continued to force the merger of powers.
Mila was having a difficult time understanding what was happening. The infernal magic should be canceling out the celestial; it didn't make any sense. Unless the magics could mix if they came from the same host?
In the end, it didn't matter. It was happening before her eyes.
The spot had gone from coin- to basketball-sized and was growing quickly. Missy buried her face in her hands and began to scream.
Mila and Victoria locked gazes, and the elder nodded.
Flooding her body with power, Mila felt herself become stronger than ever. When she launched herself forward, she was moving at a speed she had only seen Victoria and Missy achieve. In three quick strides, she had crossed the destroyed deck and was swinging Gram at Missy’s bowed head, while Victoria swung her huge falchion at her side.
Missy reached her gauntleted hand out faster than Mila could follow and a black wall formed, making Victoria’s heavy sword rebound, ringing in her hands. Gram did not encounter a black wall; it hit a golden shield, biting into the barrier but not splitting it by any means.
The entire time they attacked, she had never stopped screaming, and now that scream grew in intensity. She threw her head back, eyes closed and fists clenched at her sides.
Mila and Victoria stepped back, watching in horror as Missy’s golden wings began to drip ink-black smoke from their feather tips. In seconds, the black color at the tips had crawled halfway up each of the flight feathers, leaving the bottom half of each wing covered in a translucent dripping black substance.
Missy’s scream cut off and she lowered her head slowly, a smile on her face. “I’ve been waiting to do that for five years.” She moved her head sharply to the side, cracking her neck. “It was better than I thought.”
Mila recoiled when Missy finally opened her eyes. Her pupils had been replaced with a deep void that looked like the inside of Azoth’s hood, but where Azoth contained his void, Missy’s eyes seemed to be leaking. A thin line of turbulent, sticky black smoke spilled out, rolling up her forehead to create a kind of smoky crown.
“You didn't take his infernal magic,” Mila said in horror. “You took a part of his soul.”
“Now you begin to understand.”
The roof had gone quiet. Missy looked around at the carnage and the five members of the G.A.E.L. team pointing spell-prepped hands or wands and weapons alike. Remmy sucked in a breath and vanished, while Veronica tightened her grip on her massive weapon.
“Seems you have me at a disadvantage.” Missy chuckled, locking eyes with Mila. “Perhaps it’s time I go.”
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Mila said, raising Gram in a defensive pos
ition.
“I can live with that,” Missy remarked before taking a step back, stomping her foot, and sending out a shock wave that blasted all of Carl’s people but Nick onto their asses. Nick, however, was shoved back a good ten feet, the fur on his face and front legs flattening.
Missy then launched herself at Victoria, swiping her sword, while at the same time igniting it with black infernal fire. Victoria threw up a shield and ducked, and yelped in fear when the enhanced sword sliced through the shield with barely any resistance and missed her head by less than an inch.
Mila didn't hesitate, stabbing out with Gram. She aimed for Missy’s back, but a black shield formed just as the point was about to hit, and it skipped off. She followed the sword strike with a blast from the Ivar, but Missy simply ducked under it and swung her gauntlet in a backhand swing that caught Mila on the shoulder, knocking her to the deck.
Victoria stood from her crouch, swinging the falchion in an uppercut that caught the edge of Missy’s hastily erected golden shield and lopped one of her blue pigtails off.
“You fucking bitch!” Missy screamed, her gauntlet going to her head to feel the spiky remains of the tail as three feet of blue hair spilled across the ground.
In a rage, Missy’s flaming longsword stabbed at Victoria, who was still stretched at an odd angle after her upward swing. She was able to throw up a shield, which deflected the strike at first, but the black flames quickly ate through the shield and the sword pierced Victoria’s jeans to stab deeply into her thigh.
Victoria screamed as the black flames burned her from the inside. She fell off the sword and onto the deck, grasping her wound, continuing to scream as black flames licked out of the gash and caught her jeans on fire.
Mila made a move to help, but a thick blast of infernal mist roiled toward her from Missy’s gauntlet, forcing her to take cover behind a shield. Even with her increased power, the mist was eating through her shield at a shocking rate.
Mila touched the floor and willed a line of flame from the front of her shield and out ten feet. Magic drained from her and the deck in front of her exploded with white-hot flames, cutting off the caustic mist, but Mila lost sight of Missy in the confusion. She looked left and saw a void portal beside her. She hadn't noticed she had gotten that close to one, but when she looked right, she understood that she had not gotten that close by accident. Missy had just opened it and was on top of Mila at a full sprint. Her arms were open as she tackled her and used her momentum to carry both of them through the portal.
Mila landed hard on concrete, the impact knocking her weapons out of her hands and the breath from her lungs as Missy slammed onto her and then rolled off.
The void portal blinked out as Mila rolled over and jumped to her feet, already charging, but her arms were suddenly jerked back, and she was lifted into the air. She looked up and saw black tentacles wrapped around her wrists, and as the realization of where she was hit, two more tentacles gripped her ankles. She was easily hoisted up into a spread-eagle position.
Mila looked over as Missy stood up slowly, an evil grin on her face.
“You have done well, pet,” the rumbling creaking voice of Azoth said behind Mila's back. “I would have preferred the stronger one, but this one is a prize indeed. Such fun we will have, you and I.” He emphasized the last by shaking her violently.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Cold steel shackles clanked around Mila’s wrists. She sucked in a shocked breath as her greatly increased magical potential was cut off like a switch had been flipped.
Her senses were so dull compared to the moment before that she didn’t even realize she had been dropped until she hit the floor and crumpled into a heap. She took a few deep breaths to get used to how heavy her body felt without any kind of magic imbuing it. How had she become so used to magic in such a short time? How was this normal for her before she met Finn?
As she looked around, Mila realized she was back in the old factory. The hole she had put into the wall had been reformed, obviously with magic. Mila was surprised to see that Sarah, the Lone Valkyrie Azoth had returned with, was still alive, though unconscious as she hung from the same chains Victoria had earlier.
Missy dropped to her knees and looked up with adoration in her black eyes. “You were so right. Once I used the infernal gift you gave me so long ago, I finally understood.”
“I knew you would, pet,” Azoth rumbled from behind Mila.
“I need more. I can be your proper weapon. I have no need for this old life. I want the power. I’ll do anything for it,” Missy begged in a sharp turn from her attitude on the rooftop.
“I am in need of a proper servant.” The naked, burnt body of Yaminah hit the floor in front of Mila. “This one was a disappointment.”
Mila pushed up to a sitting position to put some distance between herself and the body, its cracked and bleeding skin charred black. Mila had a sudden pang of guilt for doing that to her, but she would have done worse to Mila, given a chance.
Then the body groaned and tried to move.
Mila’s eyes went wide. How the hell had she survived an unprotected lightning strike like that? She must have dove through the closest open portal.
“I will not fail you, lord. Please, just give me a bit more power.”
The sound of a thousand slithering snakes made Mila's skin crawl. As Azoth came out from behind her, her eyes widened further as she saw him in without a robe for the first time.
His head, arms, and torso were those of a muscular human, though his skin was stone-gray. After that he was all abomination. Instead of legs, he had a mass of black tentacles that had to number in the hundreds. But the most disturbing thing about him was that where a face should be, there was only a never-ending black void. His hood hadn’t been dark; this was his actual face. Mila tried to understand how that could even be possible, but quickly found she didn’t want to contemplate it.
The Drude slithered up to Missy and held his hand over her face. “My pet does deserve a reward. You shall have it.”
A thin black cloud fell from his hand and onto Missy’s smiling face. The cloud began to speed up, and it was soon a twisting cyclone as infernal magic was pushed into her.
“Do you know that we Valkyries and you Drude come from a similar origin? Perhaps even the same one.” Missy soaked up the magic.
“I did know that.”
“There’s an interesting theory I once heard from a witch way back when my sisters and I defeated you.”
Azoth obviously didn’t like the reference to his defeat and began to pull his hand away, but he seemed to be having trouble.
“This witch, he said that if we were in fact from the same source, we were essentially the same beings just created for different purposes.”
Azoth was beginning to struggle, trying in vain to pull away. “What are you doing? Stop. I order you to stop!”
Missy slowly stood, the Drude’s hand following her. “That got me thinking. What if a Drude and a Valkyrie switched off little bits of their souls? Would you end up with one or the other and have the abilities of both, or something completely different?”
Now Azoth had slithered towards the ground, the strength of his tentacles failing him. His arm stretched out to keep feeding his power to Missy. “No, stop. You can't do this to me. We had a deal!”
“You were never going to fulfill that deal. I knew that from the start, but I needed you to feed me until I could feed myself. And now I can, so I don’t need you. I’ll consume the rest of your soul, and I will be able to take myself off this fucking broken-down piece of garbage. I can go home. I can be free.”
Azoth started laughing, which made Missy look down at him sharply. “What is so funny? I’m about to eat your soul.”
“You want to leave so badly, but you never asked the question. Why have I not left to return with more of my kind? It’s because I can’t, Valkyrie. And the best part is that it is all your fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mila looked over and saw Gram lying not three feet away. If she could just get these cuffs off…
Mila was small, very small, and that came with small wrists. The shackles were a one-size-fits all-design, and for a standard Valkyrie, they would fit. Valkyries were generally tall and well-built women. The smallest one Mila had seen was Missy, and she was still five eight-ish.
Mila tried to pull her hand out. It wouldn’t go, but it was close—if she didn’t have that thumb in the way.
Azoth laughed again, even with his power being sucked out of him at an alarming rate. “I was defeated by you. Drude do not get defeated, and if we do, our ability to travel the universe is stripped from us. We are cursed to forever live in the place of our shame. I can’t travel the stars any more than you can. My death at your hands shut that part of my soul down.”
Missy snorted. “Haven’t you heard? We Valkyries can fix things like that. Let me just get you into a more agreeable state, shall I?”
She slammed her hands to the sides of his head, then pulled them away. Two more spinning clouds of infernal magic were sucked out of him and formed under her hands.
Azoth screamed in earnest. His head lolled back as his chest heaved and jerked. After two minutes of wailing and crying, the once-fearsome creature finally fell silent. He sagged, although his tentacles kept him from falling over.
Mila pulled as hard as she could, but she just couldn’t get the shackle over her thumb. She sighed; she knew what she had to do. With the two of them distracted, it was the perfect time.
Sitting up on her knees, she lifted one knee and awkwardly placed her hand flat on the ground, then tucked her thumb up on top so that when she lowered her knee, it would put all its pressure on the thumb joint. She repeated the process with the other hand.
