Chapter Thirty-Two #2
The three Conclave agents fought with a practiced grace that took my breath away, shifting and ducking around The-One-Who-Hungers as if they’d choreographed every step.
Ivan dropped low and sliced his knives at the creature’s legs, each cut shredding its dapper suit and exposing unhealthy-looking white flesh that smoked with silvery fire.
Corrine’s chain was a whirling blur in her hands, flicking out to knock back a blow or twining around an arm to pull the creature off-balance.
And Eric…sword shining like the sun, he slashed and parried faster than I could follow, his entire body a lithe and deadly instrument.
Even with my life in mortal peril, I’d never been hornier.
As swift as they were, however, the three of them were fighting a monster as old as humanity itself.
Its hands blurred as it deflected their attacks before launching strikes of its own with those long arms. The shadows of its face split into tendrils that lashed out faster than a serpent’s tongue, trying to pull them into its ravenous maw.
Corrine had to fall prone and roll away to avoid a vicious punch that would have caved her head in, and Eric jumped back as an inky tendril scored a hit along his side, ripping a hole in his leather jacket that might have been fatal had it struck him directly.
Without pausing, he leaped back into the fray, forcing those shadows to retreat from the brilliant light of his sword, but it was increasingly clear that each of them was only a single mistake away from disaster.
When that mistake finally came, it did so with brutal suddenness.
Contorting its body in a way that should not have been possible, The-One-Who-Hungers lunged at Ivan and punched a hand into his chest. Bones splintered with wet popping sounds beneath the impact, and he let out a high-pitched scream that ended abruptly as his lungs disintegrated.
The monster’s fist tore through Ivan’s back and his entire body convulsed, knives falling from his hands.
Then he sagged lifelessly around the arm that had impaled him.
Blood rained onto the obsidian floor, wet and gleaming in the strange firelight.
Overwhelmed by shock and horror, none of us moved, and that was when The-One-Who-Hungers flickered out of existence, leaving Ivan’s unsupported body to collapse with a jarring thud I felt through my shoes.
A heartbeat later it reappeared behind Lex, both hands closing delicately around their head, smearing Ivan’s blood through their mohawk and across their face.
Lex faltered, stumbling over the rolling incantation, and in response the walls of blue flame shrank almost to nothing.
Then we all heard their glasses give way with a small but audible crack as the Abomination began to squeeze.
I tried to move, but my legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
Helplessly, I watched Corrine’s silver chain whip around one of the monster’s arms, smoking and sizzling where it touched the bloodred suit.
Eric threw himself into a forward roll and came up beside Lex, his sword flaring with light as he slashed at the creature’s other arm.
The Abomination released its hold on Lex with a pained hiss, and Corrine used her chain to yank it backward while Eric drove it even farther with a dizzying flurry of attacks.
Lex’s voice failed as they lurched forward.
Amira steadied them, her wrist still bound to theirs by that golden chain, and then her body stiffened as her eyes went milky white.
The flames around us guttered on the brink of failure, but before they could die Amira began to recite the ancient incantation, picking up where Lex had stopped.
Next to her, Lex shuddered and lifted their head, eyes now white as well behind their broken glasses, voice rising to accompany hers.
Minds joined, they spoke as one, and the blue fire flared with new life.
Pain pulsed through my shoulder as I forced myself into a shambling run toward The-One-Who-Hungers.
Eric and Corrine were pushing it back to the edge of the ritual circle, their weapons leaving glowing tracers in the air as they danced and darted.
Behind them, Ivan’s steel-rimmed glasses sat in a spreading pool of blood.
That could have been Eric. It might still.
Forcing down my terror, I lifted my hands, spoke the nine words I’d committed to memory, and brought down the Grasp of the Endless Void.
Practitioners of the black arts love their flowery titles, but in prosaic terms, all I did was inflict the gravitational force of a small star on every particle of the monster’s body.
It went pretty much as you might expect.
As my magicks closed around it, one of its arms contorted with a dull snap of breaking bone, then the other.
Its legs, dangling several inches above the ground, compacted like an accordion.
There were more pops and snaps as gravity bore down on The-One-Who-Hungers and forced it inward to a central point.
Tendrils of shadow snaked out, fighting to escape, but inexorably they were drawn in as well until the Abomination was nothing but a tiny bead of darkness hovering in midair.
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of Lex and Amira chanting and the muted roar of the bright blue flames.
My gaze went to Eric, breathing heavily a dozen feet away, sword held loosely in one hand.
Blood seeped through a tear in his jeans and more glistened wetly on his jacket, but he was alive.
That was all that mattered. “We did it,” he said softly.
“I guess we didn’t have to bind it after all. ”
Corrine limped to Ivan’s mangled body and crouched next to it, face drawn with weariness and pain. “Just end it,” she told me dully.
Stepping closer to the quivering bead that was all that was left of The-One-Who-Hungers, I reached back and pulled the Black Blade from behind my belt.
Relief poured through me, making me giddy.
It was done. We were safe, and a whole future stretched out in front of us, bright with possibilities.
I lifted the knife, bringing it a hairsbreadth from the tiny sphere before my hand stilled.
The bead had started to vibrate erratically, oscillating more strongly with each passing moment until it was a black blur suspended in midair.
Something was wrong.
“Get back!” I shouted, turning toward Eric.
Then an overwhelming force punched my entire body and I was lifted off the ground, limbs flailing.
A heartbeat later, I connected shoulder-first with the floor.
Already weakened by the wrenching pull I’d suffered at the hands of The-One-Who-Hungers, something inside the joint crumpled with an agonizing snap as the world reeled around me.
The pain was unbelievable, like a searing, red-hot poker twisting through cartilage and bone.
Gasping for breath, I clawed at the slick obsidian, trying to orient myself, sparking new jolts of pain until I managed to get my left arm underneath my body and then lever myself up onto my knees.
The first thing I saw as my senses returned was the Black Blade.
It lay just out of reach, its dull metal now marred by a jagged chip in one edge.
I hadn’t realized it was so fragile. My head turned as I searched for Eric.
There—he’d been blown behind me by the force of the explosion.
Blood sheeted down his face as he struggled to push himself upright, though one of his legs seemed badly injured.
Beyond him, Corrine sprawled facedown on the floor, unmoving, maybe dead.
Through the ringing in my ears I heard Lex and Amira, still chanting. They’d escaped the blast.
Slowly, my gaze turned upward. A massive cloud of darkness billowed and coiled overhead like black smoke, far bigger than the dapper, unnatural body I’d crushed into a quivering point. Its edges slowly expanded as if stretching after a lengthy confinement.
That’s much better. The hollow, inhuman voice was everywhere, reverberating from the walls of the lobby and the ceiling high overhead. It was Management Who shoved me into that body, you know. Another prison I couldn’t escape. You’ve freed me a second time, Colin.
With a grunt, Eric pulled himself to his feet and drew his sword with a flare of golden light.
Shadows whipped toward him and he severed one, then another, heroic and beautiful as he danced back from another blow.
Then his leg folded under him and he staggered, off-balance.
The Abomination caught him a glancing blow that spun him around, more tendrils fastening around his body as he threw his head back and howled, the sword in his hand flickering and failing.
Do you want to know something ironic? You never needed my help. Management had Their eyes on you from your very first day in Dark Enterprises. It paused, and when it spoke again, its tone was sly. Isn’t that right, Margaret?
Confused and terrified in equal measure, I turned as the curtain of blue flames parted smoothly to reveal Ms. Crenshaw, flanked by what was left of the executive board.
There had been twelve, once—now I counted seven people arrayed to either side of the CEO.
Some of them swayed as if barely able to remain upright, and Mr. Samuels cradled one of his arms close to his portly frame, bone gleaming wetly where it protruded from a compound fracture in his wrist.
“So this is where you went,” my boss observed coolly, gaze flicking from the coiling shadows to me and back again. Pale ash streaked one side of her face and flecked her perfectly tailored suit jacket. “I was starting to wonder if you’d retreated, Abomination.”
Your protégé requested a face-to-face, and I couldn’t refuse. Eric dangled helplessly in the air, blood dripping onto the floor as dark tendrils drew him slowly toward the monster’s pulsing center. He has potential. A pity he’ll never realize it.
Turning away from Ms. Crenshaw, I fumbled awkwardly at the pockets of my khakis. Was it still there? My fingertips brushed against a small glass sphere, miraculously unbroken, its surface warm to the touch. “Please!” I called in a broken voice. “Please don’t take him. Take me instead.”
No, Colin. You’re going to watch me tear him to pieces before I eat him. More shadows seized Eric’s limbs, stretching him into an X shape like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. I’ll make it slow, so he has time to hate you. He’ll curse your name before I’m done.
Drawing my hand from my pocket, I rolled the glass orb toward the Abomination.
Light pulsed at its center as the sphere skittered on the floor, slowing a little as it passed through something sticky that used to be Ivan.
It was heavier than it looked, though, and its momentum carried it in a curving arc under the monster’s heart.
Time slowed to a crawl, and into that moment I spoke a single word.
“I?ātum.”
With a boom that shuddered through the entire building, an incandescent pillar of white flame punched up into The-One-Who-Hungers.
The heat of it was staggering, a torrent of scorching wind that made my cardigan flutter wildly and singed my eyelashes.
The swirling cloud of shadow keened at a frequency almost beyond human hearing as the otherworldly fire pierced it straight through.
Thrashing, it let Eric fall to the ground where he crumpled into an unmoving heap, clothes smoking.
The flame died almost immediately, leaving a purple afterimage glowing on my retinas, but the Abomination continued to writhe and shudder, struggling to draw itself together again. This was the best chance we were going to have. “Do it!” I screamed. “Do it now!”
Amira and Lex both shouted something in response, their voices clanging against the air like a hammer falling on an enormous anvil.
The seal in Lex’s hand flared into thousands of filaments, a delicate tracery of silver light that settled across The-One-Who-Hungers like gossamer threads.
Then those filaments tightened, no longer a frail web but a network of wires that sliced and burned as they contracted, pulling the Abomination toward the ground.
I watched as those threads twisted and doubled back on themselves, coiling into fractal knots or disappearing and then reappearing somewhere else.
That was Amira’s doing, her mind guiding the magicks into dimensions beyond conventional reality, and those strange patterns grew more and more complex by the moment, countless filaments vibrating and shifting into something both beautiful and terrible.
Lex and Amira spoke together in a desperate cry. “It’s not going to hold! It’s failing!”
Blackness strained against the threads binding it and the fractal pattern bulged in places, trembling on the very brink of ripping apart.
My friends were trying to do something on their own that had once required all of Management’s awesome power.
Shouting rose from beyond the ritual circle, perhaps the executives trying to help, as I looked down at the Black Blade.
Then I scooped it awkwardly into my left hand and started forward in a clumsy, stumbling run.
Silvery filaments snapped apart, their complicated geometry unraveling, and a piece of shadow lashed out at me.
Before it connected, there was a silent flare of golden light that left spots swimming in my vision.
The darkness recoiled, but more tendrils descended upon me in a ferocious, terrifying assault, each driven back in turn by those searing flashes.
I didn’t understand what was happening, only that it couldn’t touch me, and that was enough.
Clutching the Black Blade in my left hand, half-blind, I charged forward into that maelstrom of darkness, screaming in fear and rage as I drove both myself and the knife into the very heart of The-One-Who-Hungers.
The cracked and peeling hilt of the Blade twitched against my palm as it sank into…
something. A wordless scream rang out and my hand went icy cold, fingers cramping painfully around the worn leather.
Reality itself shifted and I was falling upward into the ceiling, moving faster and faster as shadows blurred around me and all I felt was pain.
Then darkness closed in, and everything went away.