The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 27

Quinn

The top of the hillside trembled beneath my feet. I gaped at the leviathan’s immense serpentine form, looking deceptively headless with the wavering darkness I knew was the rift around its neck.

I couldn’t hear its bellowed commands anymore, but somehow my nerves still vibrated with them, as if he were putting so much energy into them that the air leaving his lungs was setting off tremors through the atmosphere. It wasn’t hard to imagine that his call might be felt all across the shadow realm. All the way to its intended targets in the deepest depths.

My skin turned to ice for reasons that had nothing to do with my physical health.

We had to stop him. We had to turn the tide back in our favor before we had even bigger monsters to grapple with.

If we could kill him—if we could take our shots while he was totally immersed in his scheme—that would solve everything. Any sorcery he’d cast would die with him. This could all be over.

But the battle was still raging around the vehicles that’d been carrying our weapons. With the lead truck toppled and shadowkind rampaging all around the road, there was no way for them to reach this hill where they’d have a clear trajectory. No way for Rollick’s people inside to try to shoot the leviathan even from where they’d stalled without being savaged.

As I watched the skirmishes going on all across the terrain below the hill, bracing myself without any idea what action I’d need to take, it became increasingly, nauseatingly clear that we weren’t winning quickly. We might not be winning at all. Beings whirled around each other, more essence plumed into the air, but the leviathan’s horde of minions had managed to surround and divide us. It was too vast for my allies to overcome in a few decisive strikes, no matter how much my magic had ramped up their abilities.

My magic.

The answer came to me like a punch square in the chest, unmistakable and painful. There were two ways the leviathan’s minions could be stopped: through killing, which wasn’t working out at the moment, and through shattering the hold on them with someone else’s sorcery.

And the only sorcerer anywhere nearby was me.

For a second, my legs locked and my breath caught in my lungs. There were so many of them—thousands, swarming all across the landscape around me. Undoubtedly there were more in the shadows where I couldn’t see them. How the hell could I reach all of them?

I didn’t need to snap every single one of them out of their magical compulsions, I reminded myself. Just enough of them that the beings on my side could get the upper hand. If I didn’t try, if I didn’t do it fast, I’d never get the chance at all.

I closed my eyes, still seeing the carnage below playing out in the back of my mind, and yanked all the fizzing electric energy inside me into my voice.

The magic blazed through me, its searing crackle drowning out everything beyond my body. A yell so loud it scraped my throat raw burst from my mouth. Words I didn’t recognize blared from my lips through the dusk. But I knew exactly what I was saying. Don’t fight for the leviathan. Shake off his control. Go free.

Here and there, all across the battlefield, the breaking of the leviathan’s spell reverberated into me with little pops like cans shot by a BB gun. They rattled through my awareness so swiftly I couldn’t count them, but there had to be dozens.

It was working. The leviathan mustn’t have shored up his hold on his minions in a while as he’d stockpiled his energy for his larger goal. I was shattering his magic with my own.

My heart lurched with the power resounding through my body. My chest clenched up. But I shouted again and again, hurling the energy in me as far as I could, even as my legs gave and I sank to my knees.

My head was spinning. I coughed and bent forward, my fingers digging into the grass. There was no exhilaration in my sorcery now. My entire torso was on fire. A shiver passed through me as I struggled to catch my breath.

A loud, creaky thump jolted through my awareness with enough force that I managed to raise my head. My eyes widened.

The area along the road was clear again other than the scattered, smoking bodies of fallen shadowkind. A bunch of the beings who were still moving had just heaved the first truck back onto its wheels.

Its windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks, but either the driver had survived the crash without much injury or one of the other human workers had hurried forward to take his place. The engine sputtered and settled into a low rumble. Then the truck pulled forward with a slight hitch. The others growled to life behind it.

They were coming again. I’d managed to free enough of the leviathan’s minions to turn the tide like I’d hoped.

I swiveled my head, staring blearily across the darkened landscape while the turmoil inside my body radiated through every cell. The fighting had mostly moved to the rocky terrain right along the coast, near where the leviathan’s eerily immense form was still poised with his head immersed in the rift. Flares of fire glinted here and there as Sorsha, Omen, Lance, and whatever other beings could bring flames to bear let loose their heat.

Had we really done it? I couldn’t quite summon much sense of triumph through my dizziness, but my lips managed to form a small smile.

I sat back on my butt. I could tell that my legs still wouldn’t hold me up, if they ever would again. The throbbing in my chest hadn’t let up at all—my breaths were strained, as if I were trying to suck in air through the tiniest crack in my throat. But none of that mattered if we saw this moment through to the end.

The trucks roared onto the hill behind me. Shouts rang through the spaces between them as the workers hustled to drag out their cargo. I turned my head to see them setting up the half a dozen bulky contraptions, which looked like something half cannon, half crossbow, along the crest of the hill on either side of me.

One of Rollick’s people paused, looking at me, but I waved him off with a feeble gesture. “We’ve got to shoot that monster,” I croaked, tilting toward the leviathan. “As soon as you can, as much ammo as you can.”

He nodded and dashed back to the truck. I wondered vaguely what story Rollick had given these people to explain the crazy task he’d assigned them with now. They clearly understood the urgency. I guessed after everything they must have seen tonight—and in L.A. for several days before—their acceptance wasn’t totally surprising.

They loaded the weapons with blades like sharpened shards of a vast metal frisbee. Like the blades that had been loaded in the walls of the factory where we’d killed the behemoth. Maybe they’d even repurposed the exact same ones, just altered a little so they’d fly through the air properly when launched.

Those killing edges had brought down the behemoth. These ones had to work on the leviathan too.

If they didn’t, we were simply doomed.

The last blade had just clanged into place when one of the workers let out a yell that sounded more like a warning than a call to action. I jerked my attention in the direction he was staring.

The leviathan was moving again. His serpentine body shook off the beings that’d gone back to harassing him, and his head was pulling free from the rift.

Panic shot through me. Did that mean he was finished? That the Highest were on their way?

I gritted my teeth against a fresh wallop of pain and forced more words from my throat. “Shoot him! Now! Keep reloading until you’ve hit him with everything.”

Before I’d even finished speaking, the workers were springing into action. All across the line of weapons, Rollick’s people yanked the firing levers.

The blades released with a series of twangs. They whirled through the air, catching the faint beams of moonlight that penetrated the thinning clouds, and slammed into the leviathan’s body one after the other, each a little higher than the last.

The monster’s body flinched harder with each impact. He pulled his head completely free of the rift to let out an earth-shaking snarl full of pain and fury. The clouds of essence that poured up from the wounds were so thick I could see them even against the dusk.

The beings around him fell back except for Sorsha with her flaming wings. She whipped herself toward the blades, kicking them deeper into the leviathan’s flesh. The metals in our projectiles would prevent most of the other shadowkind from getting close enough to attack. But now that we were launching them, the blades were enough.

Rollick’s people scrambled to reload the weapons. They fired again, marking a path up the serpent’s undulating body almost all the way to its jaw.

The leviathan twisted and shuddered, dodging a couple of the blades, including one that would have struck it in the skull. We could only hit it from the one side, and I didn’t know how deeply the metals were digging in even with Sorsha’s assistance.

But it was faltering. With the next barrage, it only avoided one. Its body sagged, slowly crumpling over toward the sea. Smoke gushed upward from its huge carcass like it was the burning wreckage of a vast ship.

The men at the weapons stepped back. They still had a few blades left, but they couldn’t aim properly while the monster was slumped over in the water instead of stretched upright. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. The leviathan was barely even thrashing now, just twitching here and there without finding the strength to get up. Those wounds couldn’t heal while the metal was embedded in him.

We’d done it.

I almost gave in to the relief of that thought and slumped over myself. The soft grass called out to me. But as I tipped forward, leaning my weight onto my arms, a quaver of energy surged across the hillside, dissonant enough to set my teeth on edge and make every hair on my body stand on end.

I yanked my gaze upward. A gasp snagged in my throat.

Something was coming through the rift. Something huge and bulbous, like the head of a whale with an eye that must have been larger than my entire body. That eye blazed blood red, rolling beneath its heavy lid.

It was wrong. That was the only way I could describe it. Shivers wracked my body just looking at it. The air around it vibrated; an off-key pealing sound split the air.

The ocean hollowed out beneath the leviathan’s still spasming body. The water twisted and churned. Rocks along the shoreline cracked open or outright disintegrated, pebbles blasting across the ground. My skin felt as if it were about to crawl right off my body.

That—that thing had to be one of the Highest. The leviathan had called them through after all… and he wasn’t gone yet. He wasn’t totally dead, which meant his magic was holding on, and the immense being whose very presence was unraveling the fabric of my world was pushing even farther out.

I thought I saw lips pulled into a grimace on that gigantic head. The blazing eye kept flicking this way and that. Along with the bone-deep wrongness, my strongest impression was that it didn’t want to be here at all—but it couldn’t pull itself back.

Would it be able to retreat now that it’d started passing through even if the leviathan finally died, or would the momentum be too much? How much damage was it going to do even before we could answer that question?

The grass beneath my fingers was crinkling, suddenly parched dry. A cloud overhead burst apart with a boom of thunder and a shower of lightning bolts. The beast in the rift groaned, and a crack opened up right through the shoreline into the ocean floor.

Terror and pain screamed together all through my body. I could barely feel my limbs. But my eyes fell on the leviathan’s smoking body, and one tiny thought penetrated my stupor like a needle threading the last inspiration I might ever get through my mind.

The leviathan had the power to call that horrifying thing through… and his power was now up for the taking.

I shoved myself down the side of the hill. My limbs flailed like they were made of jelly; every choked breath burned in my chest. I dug my fingers into the grass and heaved out with my knees, propelling myself forward with every bit of strength I had in me.

Dark wings flapped overhead. Crag grasped my shoulders. “Where are you going, Softness?” he asked in a low, pained rumble that I barely heard through the rising thrum of wrongness.

“Get me to the leviathan,” I rasped out. “Please.”

I didn’t think he wanted to follow that order, and I hadn’t put any sorcery into it, but the gargoyle granted my final request. With a growl, he lifted me into the air and carried me over the shattering rocks to the monster’s crumpled body.

I flung myself out of Crag’s arms down on the nearest wound. As I opened my mouth, the fiend’s essence rushed up my throat, nearly suffocating me. Stiffening my body, I gulped and gulped, no matter how the noxious smoke seared at my insides, no matter how tightly the vise around my heart clamped.

The leviathan’s essence prickled through every nerve in my body. My pulse stuttered and faltered. It was too much, like I was trying to drink down the entire ocean, more than any one body was meant to hold.

But I needed it. I needed to hang on just long enough to—to?—

There was no room left in my head even for thoughts now. Just drink, drink, drink.

When I couldn’t stand to suck in one more puff of essence, I flipped over onto my back and stared up at the rift. My mind was whirling like the whipped-up clouds overhead. The huge, unnatural presence above me felt as if it were about to tumble down onto me and squash me flat.

I opened my mouth and let out the sorcery I’d swallowed, all of it, on top of the talent I’d already possessed, pleading to whatever other powers might exist to let it be enough.

“Go home!” I screamed in the language of the magic. “Go back through the rift. Get away from here!”

Agony cut through the center of my chest. My heart seemed to split in two. My vision hazed with growing blotches of black. But I felt my magic smash the leviathan’s last lingering spell with a cracking sensation that rebounded into my body.

The Highest being groaned again, but there might have been relief in it this time. As my pulse dwindled to nothing and the pain spread through every inch of my frame, it jerked back into the rift. The last thing I saw before my vision blanked completely was its bulbous head slipping out of sight.

The catastrophe was done… and so was I. I had the sense of a tear tricking down my cheek, but a strange contentment swept over me before my awareness blinked out.