“So glad to see you guys,” Holden said.
“What’s the situation up here?”
“Maternity is secure. Or, it was.” Holden frowned. “Whatever that was a minute ago, it knocked out every electronic in this place, including the magnetic locks on the doors.”
“We have everyone secured behind as many doors as possible,” Gabriel added. “Any idea what we’re dealing with?”
“Felt like the completion of a ritual,” Sebastian said.
“Not just any ritual.” Simon’s jaw clenched. “One of, if not the very most complicated rituals of all. We may have a lich on our hands.”
Darkling mages were some of the worst, a cautionary tale all magical creatures knew. When a mage went bad, they committed, going so far as to remove their heart. The process made them pretty much invulnerable.
“We’re going to need more help if we’re dealing with a lich,” Victor said.
“Then we need to hold until backup arrives from Lake County. Let’s get everyone—”
A low groan traveled up the stairwell, followed by the low hisses and grunts of the undead. Then the first heads appeared over the top of the stairs and we all took aim. We fired, but they moved faster than I remembered. With all of us shooting, it should have been easy.
Never mind that we’d already cleared every floor and this shouldn’t have been possible. As I ejected one magazine for another, one of the zombies in the middle of the swarm twisted his body around and leapt onto the ceiling like a spider. Another jumped onto the rail. They moved jerky and fast, creepier than their slow predecessors.
“What the fuck?” Sebastian blurted out.
“He’s had nothing but time to perfect his viruses,” Simon said. “Nothing should surprise you now.”
At least their tongues weren’t long and prehensile. We’d be doomed if the Plague Doctor had made our worst Resident Evil nightmares come true. Panic thundered in my veins and roared between my ears, filling my head with the wild sound of my own terrified heart.
The dude lunged from the ceiling like an undead Spider-Man, only to have his head taken off by a precise shotgun blow from Holden.
“How the fuck does he have so many of them, and where are they coming from?” Victor asked.
Claws clicked against tile and the sound of something heavy approached. I knew in my gut what to expect before the wendigo appeared, salivating and drooling blood from its massive maw. It bounded from the lower landing, barreling through walking corpses. And still, more of the human variety were coming, grossly outnumbering us.
“Skylar, focus your barriers on those doors! Nothing is to get through them, do you understand?” Simon shouted.
“But—”
“Do as he said,” Gabriel growled.
I hated it, but I ripped my Prismatic Barrier away from Gabriel and slammed it against the doors defending the birthing center.
“Pilar and Lia, barriers from here to the stairwell. I need a two-wall barrier. Bottleneck the zombies and force them to approach us through a narrow space. We don’t want any more of these wallcrawlers.”
“Got it!” Lia cried.
The wendigo hurtled straight from the center of the birthing center lobby and into the security door guarding, slamming against it with a tremendous shudder. The echo vibrated through my mind like a harp chord. Neither my head nor my magical endurance appreciated nearly losing my Prismatic Barrier in one blow. I staggered the second time he did it, but I ground my teeth and funneled more power into it.
Victor, Cole, and Holly took on the influx of zombies while Lia and Pilar slowed their approach. Simon’s magic lit the space between us in shades of dazzling red, green, and electric blue, sizzling through the space in tandem with Gabriel, Stark, and Sebastian’s gunfire.
The wendigo shrugged off everything they sent at it.
“These silver bullets are useless!” Stark cried in dismay.
“Of course they are,” Sebastian said. “It’s already dead.”
For some reason, the wendigo had a hard-on for the birthing center. I wondered if it could smell the fresh babies and the blood of new mothers. My barrier cracked, slicing pain across my temples like a hammer blow to the head. I gritted through it.
“Skylar can’t hold this up for much longer. We gotta take it down!” Gabriel shouted.
Lia turned to Pilar. “Help her!”
Pilar’s glamour joined mine and we put everything we had into it together, but still, their bullets only seemed to enrage the wendigo and push it harder. Fissures appeared faster than Pilar and I could stop them.
The next time the beast rammed its enormous, blood-smeared nose against the steel, the barrier disintegrated like stardust. Pilar screamed, her knees buckling, and I stumbled back from it.
One of the guys swore. The metal warped and bent inward, despite the incredible thickness of it.
My head throbbed like a mallet against a gourd and tears stung my eyes. Pilar joined me again, squeezing my hand in hers. Through blurry eyes, I watched Gabe flick Shōki from the scabbard.
Oh no. No. He wasn’t going to go after a wendigo with a sword, was he?
Dain’s words drifted through my mind, precisely the wrong thing to pop into my head at the moment.
I wanted to scream out for him not to do it, but I didn’t dare break his concentration. I had to have faith in him. I had to believe in Gabriel’s training.
He lunged, swooping low. The blade glittered in the air, glinting light and magic. It took out one foreleg, but the beast turned on him with hunger in its dead eyes.
The next stroke cleaved through its neck, but it was incomplete, maybe hitting a bone instead of slicing between the vertebrae. Then Gabe got out of there, maneuvering away from the beast as a bird. Their game of cat and mouse carried on for ten seconds. Each time his blade landed, the beast came closer to losing its head.
Appearing to anticipate Gabriel’s next appearance, the decaying wendigo launched itself face-first toward my mate when he came out of a shift on its other side.
It all happened so fast. I screamed in rage and terror, too slow to return my barrier around Gabriel. A split-second before the beast should have connected, Sebastian was there with his machete. Blood and spittle flew, and the next few moments became a blur of trauma in my mind. Sebastian disappeared beneath the frenzied dark wolf and then Simon’s spell flew like an electric razor of energy, completing the job Gabriel began. Stark and Gabe grabbed their mentor by his arms and hauled him out from beneath the disabled wendigo.
We had nowhere to go but the birthing center, and opening the doors now while we were under siege was absolutely off-limits.
“Prismatic Barriers divide the lobby, now!” Simon bellowed. “Holly, you’re on defense.”
Holly changed from offensive spells and channeled her magic into a shield. Through the mishmash of translucent barriers, I watched the other side of the lobby fill with dangerous monstrosities, and I wondered how much time we had until the Plague Doctor threw a new challenge at us.
“This won’t hold for long,” Holly said, panting. “We’re sitting ducks in here.”
“And once they get past us…” I didn’t want to think about it. All of those newborns and helpless mothers.”
As though to emphasize her point, the patchwork barrier shuddered and a dent buckled Holly’s portion.
My gaze darted to Sebastian, who sat with his back against the wall while Simon looked him over. He had blood on his face, a nasty scratch running from the center of his forehead to his ear. The wendigo had bitten his forearm, a puncture from its teeth going right through to the other side, and in the harsh glow of the emergency lights, I could see his pants were also soaked in blood.
Gabriel met my gaze and my stomach sank as I read the fear in his eyes.
“Bash…”
“Hey. Hey. It’s good.” Sebastian tried to smile, but it came out more of a grimace. “I can still fight.”
Simon, always so stoic, looked on t
he verge of tears. My own eyes burned in sympathy.
“No, I need to get you out of here. We need to get you back to campus.”
“There’s no time for that, and you know it. Besides, you can’t portal out. Even if you could, you wouldn’t leave these kids.”
Our barrier shuddered beneath the onslaught, cracking beneath heavy fists that felt no pain. I smoothed it over again with a fresh rush of glamour. “Simon, we can handle this. We can hold off if—”
“No,” he interrupted, voice thick. “Sebastian is right, I couldn’t open a portal right now even if I wanted to with all this magical interference in the air.”
Sebastian groaned and tried to stand, ultimately sliding right back down to the floor. “God, this sucks. Simon, you know what you have to do.”
“No.”
“We knew this was always a possibility.”
“I won’t do it.”
Watching the two of them, I saw myself in Simon’s position. If it had been Gabe… My heart lurched at the mere thought, sending my pulse into overdrive. I wouldn’t be able to do it either.
Sebastian reached up and cupped a hand against Simon’s face. I glanced away, feeling like an intruder on a private, intimate moment.
My eyes stung from tears and the sweat pouring off my brow. It was so hot in here.
“Then give me the shotgun.”
“No, dammit!” Simon’s yell cracked across the room. No one spoke, the only sound the meaty thump of zombie fists and Sebastian’s labored breaths. As sentinels, we all knew the risk of a job going sideways, but this situation shouldn’t have ever been possible.
“Being your partner these past years has been everything to me. I wouldn’t change a minute of it. Not even your old man.”
Despite myself, my gaze turned back to the two. Tear tracks stood out against Simon’s dark cheeks. I wondered what the story was with Simon’s dad, but I could make a guess. Whatever he said in reply was too low for me to hear.
“I can’t hold it much longer!” Pilar cried. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I—”
Lia and I weren’t enough. Once we lost Pilar, everything fell apart. Simon and Sebastian remained behind us and, try as I might, I couldn’t help but fear we’d be mauled from behind.
Simon wouldn’t let it happen.
The horde rushed in, a tangle of rotting, gory bodies. For every zombie that hit the floor, another seemed to take its place. They swarmed us, held off by the barriers Simon and Holly projected, which were rapidly losing strength.
It took a moment to realize more than pressure and stress were at work. The glamour around my necklace fell apart, revealing the five brilliant red stones.
I couldn’t wear the necklace a second longer. It was glowing red-hot and scorching me in a way it never had before, and the heat only continued to build.
Either it was priming to detonate, or it was charging to…do something.
It’s time.
I didn’t know if it was my thought or someone else’s, but it cleaved through my panic. Desperate, I clawed open the catch on the Heartflame. The red light washed over us all and filled the air with more warmth than a ten-foot bonfire.
In a sudden burst of intuition, I lunged toward Lia and clasped the necklace around her throat.
The reaction was instantaneous and terrifying. Light blinded me and heat overwhelmed my senses, scorching over me in rolling waves that I felt bone deep. Then my friend erupted in flames.
A pulse of power thrust me away from her. Stumbling over my own feet, I landed in a huddle with Gabriel. I thought we were burning alive as the inferno washed over us and sizzled through our clothing, searing skin. Yet somehow, I remained standing. The flames made seeing difficult.
My full vision returned as the odor of burning flesh and roasted zombie infiltrated my nose. Mounds of ash and flash-incinerated corpses surrounded us. Blackened bits of people and zombies covered the floor like coal sculpted into vaguely human forms.
And then there was Lia. I gasped when I saw her. Her hair was living fire and her clothing had become a gown of breathtaking beauty—cobalt silk trimmed with rubies and scarlet feathers hugged her curves and spilled to her ankles, but she remained barefoot.
She was still Lia, and she wasn’t. Her eyes had changed, reflecting the weight of centuries of knowledge and a deep, profound sadness.
“Queen Titania,” Simon breathed. “Scruffy, look. You were right.”
Sebastian opened his tired, bloodshot eyes, and somehow, he grinned. “Told ya she was the one.”
“You’re always right,” Simon assured him.
In hindsight, I wondered how I’d ever thought it could be Pilar.
“We don’t have time to stand here staring,” Lia said in a quiet voice that sounded no different now that she had Ascended than it did moments before. When I stood, she took me by the wrist and snapped off one of the little cabochons from my bracelet, breaking the magic bubble between her thumb and forefinger. The preserved flower oozed out. She stepped up to Sebastian, rolling the blossom between her fingers and crushing it. “I need you to eat this.”
“Will it cure him?” Simon asked.
“No, but it will slow the rate of infection until she can.” She nodded to Holly.
“Me?” Holly blinked. “Lia, I don’t have a cure. I barely—”
“You’ll find the cure down below with the lich who made this foul disease. I know because I saw it, just now when I Ascended. I saw the path that awaits you all. He’s waiting for you in the darkness, but he is not alone, and defeating him won’t be easy. He has gone rogue from his original assignment. I sense…great anger and tumult between the Plague Doctor and his associates. But he has also prepared a long while, and this hospital is his place of power. He means to leave here and to infect many, many more people, spreading his disease from city to city.”
“A lich means a reliquary. Where is his?” Simon asked, not missing a beat.
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Lia answered sadly. “What Sight I had is dwindling now, overcome by the darkness in this place. All that I know, I’ve already said. I see only the shape of events, but their colors and details remain concealed from me.”
As the seconds passed, she seemed less like the Lia I knew, and I didn’t have the time to be terrified by that because Sebastian was dying.
Right then, Sebastian stumbled to his feet and shook his head, resembling a dog with water in his ears. Groaning, he pushed both with his index and middle fingers.
Simon caught him around the waist. “What’s wrong?”
“The sound,” Sebastian groaned, doubling over and pressing his ears. “It’s getting louder.”
We all exchanged glances. We heard nothing.
“What sound?” Simon continued, hands on his mate’s shoulders.
“The whistle.”
“Take me to it.”
With Sebastian in the lead, we entered the maternity ward and watched him beeline to the desk. Simon tensed. Gabriel palmed the grip of his gun, and I prepared to throw up a barrier.
Please, I prayed. Don’t let this blow up in our faces.
The werewolf prowled around the desk, sniffing, wincing, pausing to look at the items on the surface. Finally, he snatched the flower vase from the nurse’s station and hurled it on the floor. Scattered pieces of it flew to every corner of the entrance hall, but his pinched features relaxed. He straightened and rolled his shoulders.
“That was it.”
“Mighta helped if you let me look at it first,” Simon said mildly, with the unsurprised tone of a man accustomed to picking up his partner’s messes. He crouched beside one chunk of porcelain and turned it over. The remnants of a fading glyph darkened as he did.
“Sorry,” Sebastian said, looking abashed. “I just couldn’t take another second of it. Thought it was going to drive me insane.”
“Not surprised. I couldn’t read the entire spell, but it looks like some sort of…homing signal. A magical signal. There are probab
ly more of these throughout the hospital.”
“Remember all those flowers down in the lobby?” Gabriel asked. “What do you wanna bet that’s why those were all bashed up?”
“Doctor Hoffman brought those flowers this afternoon,” Pilar said hesitantly. “But the vase has been there.”
A memory flashed through my mind. “He’s delivered flowers every time I’ve visited, but that first time he provided the vases, remember?”
“She’s right,” Lia said. “Kendra remarked on it several times. All the nurses did.”
“Hoffman. Fuck!” I shouted, spinning on my heel. “I get it now. I was so wrapped up with Gregori’s suspicious behavior that I never paid attention to bad vibes coming off Hoffman. Because there weren’t any bad vibes. When I saw the guy, he was just bursting with happiness.”
“A man whose plans were going well,” Gabriel said. “It makes sense, but that still doesn’t tell us where he is.”
“Beneath us. That’s all I can see. You must go now. If we wait any longer, I fear it will be too late. I would go with you, but—”
“You’re weakened,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. “You just spent a lot of power clearing that room, and we can’t thank you enough for it. But you’re weak.”
“I am,” she whispered. “I want to come with you. I’m sorry, but this battle ahead isn’t meant for me.”
“Stay with Pilar and these humans. They need you here.”
I hugged her tightly then stepped outside to rejoin the others. Simon had Sebastian in his arms again, the big wolf still pale, but no longer glistening with sweat and sickness.
“I’m going too.”
“No, you’re not,” Simon said in a low voice. Before Sebastian could argue, his mate whispered a spell and the wolf’s eyes rolled back into his head.
“I’ll do my best for him,” Lia promised.
“I know you will.” He laid a kiss on Sebastian’s brow then rose and looked over the rest of us. “It’s time to end this.”
28
The Descent
The Plague Doctor: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 3 Page 24
