Chapter Eight
I shifted to the landing when I could have just shifted him to me and my backup. But I wasn’t thinking, and anyway, I didn’t need backup for Tony. I didn’t need anything except to catch him!
But that was harder than it sounds, as an entire retinue was behind the silver, god-like creature that I appeared beside. And this one was a little different. The latest heir had been posing on the balcony and sharing his sneer with the room a second before, looking like this was all beneath him.
But an instant after I arrived, that changed. A silver sword almost magically materialized in his hand because the fey had lightning reflexes when they chose. But my reflexes were fast, too, thanks to Gertie’s relentless training, and with the aid of the Pythian power, I disappeared before he could slash at me.
And reappeared down the corridor at the end of a glittering train of people, also all in white and diamonds and with the same sneers on their faces, as if they smelled something and suspected it was me. They all turned my way, including their leader down the hall, who I belatedly noticed had long, silver-blond hair. Crap.
I dodged the sword the bastard threw a second later by catching it mid-air with my power and shifting it to the middle of the sea outside. And then stared around at the now shocked faces of his crew, searching for Tony. I didn’t see him, but I did see a hundred swords suddenly appear and lunge at me.
Crap!
I shifted back to the dining room because I must have missed him somehow. Although I didn’t see how, as he’d been in black, something that should have stood out against all that dazzling white. But all I found was a silver blur leaping for me, who I caught halfway through the motion and shifted him to the same place as his sword.
His crew gasped with surprise as their champion reappeared on the water side of the ward, facing the other way. He spun to boggle us for a second with all that otherworldly hair floating around his head. And then I was almost trampled by his retinue bolting down the stairs, with several already trying to take down the ward on the run.
Since that would flood the dining hall, they were immediately countered by some of what I guessed were the old royal guards. Nimue hadn’t been about to let her people be outshone by overdressed guests, which was why they were wearing peacock-colored armor that started as dark blue in the midsection and radiated outward in every color of blue, green, gold, and, on the very outer bits, flashes of red. It looked less like dragon scale and more like the fish variety, with tiny, overlapping platelets that hugged their bodies like a second skin, but I guessed it did the trick.
Because they stopped the throng, being determined that the ward wasn’t going down. Unfortunately, the other side was just as determined that it was and pulled weapons. The two forces met with a clash of metal on metal that clanged horribly in the room’s excellent acoustics.
I was with the guards on this one. If Silver Hair was coming to compete, presumably, he knew how to swim. I was more concerned about Tony but still didn’t see him.
“Cassie!” Pritkin was fighting to get to me, but the room was suddenly full of standing, jostling, unhappy people.
Some of the latter were a bunch of newly arrived guards, flooding through the door behind me and looking around in confusion. Others were the diners, many of whom were staring at the ward in what looked like terror, why I didn’t know. They were members of Nimue’s court; even if the worst happened, they could handle it, right?
Only they didn’t seem to think so. One woman pointed at something and started screaming something that my translator didn’t know, and then everybody broke and ran. And I do mean everybody.
It was like the starting gun at a race track had just been fired. They were all coming and coming fast, leaping over tables, clawing at each other to get to the exits, and clogging the stairs. And one—
Was Tony.
“There!” I screamed at Alphonse, who was almost on top of the bastard.
I tried to shift him to me this time, as there were so many fleeing people that I couldn’t get a good landing spot beside him. But grabbing him in the chaos proved difficult, and my spell caught several other richly dressed diners instead, who went utterly ape-shit when they suddenly appeared beside me on the stairs. And now I couldn’t hear anything, with them screaming bloody murder.
Including whatever Alphonse was saying because he’d heard me but hadn’t seen the fat man. And neither did I anymore, as Tony was a good foot and a half shorter than the average for the room and was as dark-haired as most of the court. I lost him in the throng, and shifting bunches of people to the peripheries and out of the way didn’t help.
In fact, it did the opposite, as suddenly I was the problem instead of the murderous bastard they’d been hiding at their court. The guards must have gotten a message from someone because they stopped looking around cluelessly and started fighting their way toward me. That didn’t work so well, as the doorway was now clogged with partygoers, all desperate to escape the ongoing fight through the same doors the guards had used.
I figured I had a few seconds.
So, I shifted more people off the dais, clearing a path around Alphonse and hunting for the bastard that had to be there somewhere. Until my power abruptly cut out thanks to that infernal portal, and I still didn’t see him. It was like he’d vanished into thin air!
And I guessed that Alphonse couldn’t track his scent, which he damned well should have been able to as a vamp who had known Tony for a couple of centuries. But instead, he was shouting and pointing, only not at him. At the guards, I realized, who were almost on top of me, and now I couldn’t shift!
But Pritkin saw the problem from halfway across the ballroom and came up with a solution that hadn’t occurred to me. The next moment, he flung a hand at the straining ward, where a soaked and furious fey was about halfway through the spurting hole some of his people had managed to make while others held off the guards. His finery was a lot less fine now, and there was murder on his face.
Which was quickly replaced by shock when he was suddenly all the way through, along with thousands of gallons of water, as that entire section of the ward abruptly gave way.
A wall of ocean fell in, swamping that half of the hall and quickly washing across the great space. That would have been more of a problem anywhere else, but here. . . Well, look at that, I thought in amazement, as mermaid tails suddenly flashed everywhere.
It looked like maybe one in ten of the guests were shifters, with their scales gleaming brightly under the lights still spinning above us. That included antler-head, who morphed and slipped out of his clothes through the expansive neck hole. I was starting to understand the fashions here, I thought, as he flaunted a heavily muscled tail before surging off into the deep.
The guests with brighter hair colors were all doing the same, their lower bodies flooding with blue, turquoise, or silver-green scales and a few pale lavenders. The tails usually matched their hair, the latter of which should have clued me into the fact that Nimue’s court wasn’t as homogenous as it seemed, even among the elite. And now it looked like the world’s craziest disco, as water frothed and bubbled around the fleeing merfolk, as their legged counterparts thrashed and flailed, and as the sea continued to rise and rise fast.
And as Tony got away, because there was no way I could find him in all that.
Damn it!
If you’d stayed calm, you could have had him, I thought, furious at myself. I was supposed to be better than this; I’d been taught to be better! Gertie would be chewing my ass out right now, and she’d be right.
And then someone grabbed me from behind because the guards had kept their eyes on the prize while I’d been daydreaming.
Two mistakes, I thought grimly and shoved my elbow back into somebody I couldn’t see because he’d latched onto me too tight. But he let go at that, and not because I’d hit his solar plexus, where I’d been aiming. I’d forgotten: the fey were typically at least a foot taller than most humans, meaning that his stomach wasn’t where my blow had landed.
He gasped and let me go; I spun and ducked under another guard’s reaching arms and was then confronted by four more beyond him. The only good thing was that they didn’t have swords out. The bad was that, with fey strength and agility, they didn’t need them.
But they weren’t the only menace in town, as demonstrated when I was snatched backward off the balcony by what looked like a giant, purple octopus’ leg.
Maybe because it was a giant, purple octopus’ leg, I realized in shock, as the creature it was attached to waved me around in the air, giving me a skewed view of the dining hall. And of a bunch of equally surprised fey staring up at us. And of the guards diving off the stairs after me.
I didn’t see anything else as the creature shoved me under the waves and tried to drown me.
It did a pretty good job, even when I grabbed a knife off a now-submerged table and shoved it into its leg. I’d hoped the pain would cause it to let me go, but instead, it just made it mad. And so did the guards’ actions, who, weirdly enough, seemed to be on my side.
I saw them when I ended up back in the air briefly, sucking in oxygen and noticing that they’d pulled swords, a couple of spears, and an honest-to-God trident from somewhere and were trying to skewer my attacker. Or maybe they were trying to skewer me, but I didn’t think so. Because one of them threw the trident straight into one of the creature’s giant eyeballs, only for the beast to start flailing furiously in a storm of massive suckered legs, one of which sent the guard sailing across the hall.
It then turned and headed out to sea with its prize, I guessed to eat me in private.
I finally got a good look at it and didn’t enjoy it any more than I had the whale. It was less like an octopus and more like Cthulhu, being almost as tall as the dining hall’s expansive ceiling and having way more than the standard eight legs. There must have been fifty under there, along with a ruff of smaller ones around its neck, which could telescope out to many times their length.
I saw one of the “little” kind stretch to sock a fey who was readying a spell a third of the way across the ballroom while another took a trident from an attacker and tried to skewer him with it. But it couldn’t penetrate his armor, resulting in the beast settling for smacking him over the head. All while fighting a dozen other battles, because yeah. Each of those arms probably had its own brain.
At least, that was how Earth octopi worked, and it looked like Big Daddy was no different. The larger legs had heft, and the smaller had range, and each likely had its own crazed little brain bent on destruction. Meaning that we weren’t fighting a single adversary but a whole platoon.
Not surprisingly, the beast was winning.
Nimue’s guards and Silver Hair’s posse found themselves on the same side, battling for their lives, which wasn't going well based on how many were being tossed around. And I wasn’t doing any better. The mini-mind concentrating on me was flushing dark aubergine in annoyance at the fact that I stubbornly kept breathing.
But dragonscale doesn’t crush easily, no matter how much the beast tried. So the creature jerked, making the arm holding me whip around hard enough almost to snap my neck. But allowing me to see—
“Alphonse?” I yelled, catching sight of the dark figure who had just grabbed one of the massive arms despite looking ridiculously small next to his enormous adversary.
But master-level vamps don’t care what size you are. Master-level vamps just put a hurting on whatever was pissing them off. And Alphonse was no exception.
Guess he really did join our side, I thought, as he and the behemoth fought it out.
It was a little hard to tell what was going on because of all the water and people being flung about and because the guards trying to heal the ward had only managed to get part of it back up. The ocean was still pouring in through a sizeable gap, and the screaming, shouting, and cursing hadn’t diminished. The fey didn’t seem any less horrified at the party crasher than I was, and they sure weren’t volunteering to help battle it, being too busy trampling each other while fighting their way to the exits.
That kind of thing sped up even more when Pritkin joined the fight. I couldn’t see him from this angle, but I knew the feel of his magic as well as my own and felt a smile break over my face. Alphonse could seemingly keep the beast from escaping but couldn’t do much else.
Pritkin could.
As demonstrated when a line of spell fire sliced through the huge arm holding me and sent me plunging into the sea.
I wasn’t free, as the tentacle refused to let me go despite not being attached to its host anymore. But I heaved and struggled and managed to pull myself partway out of its grip, enough to break the churned-up surface of the water, gasping and trying to see what was going on. Only to find that I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Bright red rings had appeared all over the great creature’s skin, the color of freshly spilled blood. I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t look good. And then I knew it wasn’t when the beast spurted an oily, black substance everywhere, clouding the water and fountaining through the air like a fire hose.
People screamed and dove, and a line of black ooze hit Silver-Hair, melting his pretty get-up instantly and stopping only when it hit dragonscale. But while his entourage were cursing and backing the hell up as fast as their heavy armor would let them, he stood his ground. And unlike the other overdressed popinjays I’d seen tonight, he seemed to have a spine because he snarled, pulled a spear off his back, and lunged for the beast.
He’d been trying to gut me a moment ago, but I was glad to have him on board. Because Alphonse had just gone sailing, having been whip-cracked halfway across the room by the tentacle he’d been fighting. And the guards had backed off, probably realizing that they were just getting in the way.
Or maybe they were waiting for reinforcements. Because maybe ten of them were still in action, and they didn’t seem to think that was enough. Which it wasn’t for tackling Behemoth up there, but they could have freed me!
Only nobody seemed interested in freeing me.
Quite the contrary, I realized as a spear sliced through the air and missed my head by inches. I stared around, wondering how bad someone’s aim had to be to miss the writhing mountain of flesh up there with legs bigger than ancient oaks and suckers the size of the guards’ shields. And then two other spears and a spell came whizzing past, the latter bouncing off my armor, and I caught a clue.
But I still didn’t see the culprits, and who could in all this? Water was being thrown around everywhere, grand sprays of it, like the ocean hitting a seawall in a hurricane. The ink was hitting the water and sizzling like fire, only this kind didn’t go out. It did leave puddles of acid-like fury, however, floating around and eating anything or anyone unlucky enough to get in their path.
Which could be anyone since those thousand damned tentacles were churning things up like the swells in a mighty gale. I was bobbing up and down helplessly and couldn’t half see. Like who was trying to kill me in the middle of all this!
It could have been anybody, or everybody, because they all had reason, didn’t they? This whole poisonous court was at each other’s throats, which went doubly for me. I’d probably have more of them targeting me if they could see worth a damn.
Wouldn’t it be nice if I died in this, and they could blame it on the monster?
Or if Pritkin did, I realized.
And fuck that!
I started hacking with renewed interest at the severed limb, trying to cut a wedge with my knife that might free up the rest of my body or at least give me some wiggle room. Pritkin threw another fiery spear and dove underwater to avoid an attack by half a dozen of those great arms. And Silver-Hair got in a few spear thrusts that the creature didn’t even feel.
Or maybe it did, as one of the wildly whipping arms snatched up a member of his entourage, and this one wasn’t wearing dragonscale. The man’s scream cut off with a wet-sounding crunch, and blood splattered down like rain, hot and sticky against my face. I spat it out, Silver-Hair’s entourage broke and swam, and Alphonse reappeared and grabbed the tentacle still holding me.
Finally!
He seized it by the wound I’d made and ripped out a large enough chunk that I could slither out of its grip. It was still thrashing around, trying to find me, but it had no vision anymore, being just a severed arm. We left it curling and frothing up the water behind us as we swam away.
“You okay?” Alphonse screamed, which still wasn’t enough for me to hear him. But I read his lips and nodded, the concern on his face unexpectedly endearing.
And then Pritkin surfaced, gasping and looking around for me.
Just in time to get hit in the face by a massive spray of black.