Chapter Nine
I screamed, fear clawing at my chest, and desperately searched the churning waves for Pritkin but couldn’t see him. Just an oil slick of that hideous black stuff, puddling and steaming in the water. But then he surfaced again, and I noticed that the stain stopped a foot away from his face and started dripping down something I couldn’t see.
Because he was shielded; of course, he was!
I felt my heart start up again as he sent a spear of fire at the great head, aiming for the remaining good eye. But the creature moved with liquid speed and the bolt missed, flung aside by one of the larger tentacles and hitting the ceiling instead. It took out some of the roaming lights, causing an uptick in the panicked screaming from the crowd, but other than for a burn on the arm that had hit it, the creature suffered no damage.
So, on top of everything else, it was spell-resistant.
Great.
And Pritkin couldn’t risk firing again until he cleared his vision because too many people were around. Including more guards, a few dozen of whom ran onto the landing above us. And stopped dead right before a line of acid ink was flung at them.
They got shields up but did not advance, maybe because they were used to having a demigoddess fight their battles for them. Which might be why they were looking at me. And Alphonse seemed to agree with them.
“If you’re gonna do anything, now would be the time,” he rasped, staring around with an expression that that unfortunate face wasn’t used to.
Alphonse was a lot of things, but a coward wasn’t among them, as he’d already proven. But he didn’t know what to do about this. Which, two of us, Alphonse!
But I knew one thing. “That’s not going to be enough!” I yelled up at the guards, who were holding the standard issue spears, swords, and a couple of tridents. “Get some decent weapons! Now!” And when they just stood there, I flung out a hand, which was a total bluff as I couldn’t do a damned thing at the moment. “Go!”
To my surprise, they went. Of course, whether they intended to return was anybody’s guess, but we couldn’t depend on it. Which Alphonse seemed to agree with.
“God . . . damn it!” he yelled, being interrupted by a wave splatting him in the face. “You’re . . . a goddess!”
Which was not strictly true and completely unhelpful. But that was, I thought, as my power returned, like a glittering hand reaching out to engulf me. And for once, it was right on time.
Okay, I thought, let’s see what all that training was worth.
I sent a bolt flowing at the hulking bastard towering above us, and I didn’t miss. The remaining great milky eye had been staring around, searching the bobbing crowd, and had finally spotted me. But I spotted it, too, and the next second, one of the biggest tentacles aged out of existence, poofing away in a storm of ashes.
And I do mean a storm. That thing must have weighed a thousand pounds because it ate a spell strong enough to take down ten men. Unfortunately, I’d been aiming for the head but couldn’t get near it since those thousand thrashing arms served as their own kind of shield.
I sent a few more rapid-fire spells, but the same thing happened. The creature was smart enough to have learned from the initial attack, which it had ignored until a guard took out its eye. It wasn’t going to risk that again, meaning that I couldn’t get to the head until I took down those damned arms, which were moving so fast I could barely see them!
But it could see us and came rushing through the ash cloud with telescoping tentacles punching all around us and a great leg slapping the waves where we’d just been.
But Alphonse had already grabbed me and plunged us underwater, with debris hitting down everywhere from the creature’s attack. We surfaced in time to watch the latest group of guards who’d just come in turn around and flee. Along with half of the ballroom, who looked like they’d lost faith in this particular goddess, and they knew the monster better than I did.
“Shit!” Alphonse said, grabbing an abandoned trident off a small, floating table. “Stop time!” he yelled.
And, yeah, I could do that, but that was one of the hardest Pythian spells. It would sap my energy for the rest of the day, no portal needed. So, if I pulled that trick out of the bag and it wasn’t enough. . .
“Damn it, do something! ” Alphonse yelled because the colossal creature had just spotted us again.
“Chimera!” I said, defaulting to a slightly less taxing spell, and felt the intensely creepy sensation of my body splitting into two identical Cassies. We could only channel half of the power each this way, but half was better than dead.
My doppelganger broke away from me, and we went in opposite directions, with Alphonse grabbing me and swimming below a mass of small, floating tables that obscured the world above us like water lilies on a pond. But it must have also obscured the view from up top since Cthulhu turned the other way. And started even more waves crashing about as it searched for my double.
We surfaced to see the other Cassie fire off a spell and miss and then show off some of the next-level shit Gertie had beaten into me, sometimes literally. So many times, I had gone to bed aching in every muscle, feeling drained and inadequate, and sometimes having to get up again to puke my guts out, but I had learned. As demonstrated when I watched myself disappear, but not because I’d shifted.
“What happened?” Alphonse said. “Where’d she go?”
“There,” I said as my doppelganger reappeared after speeding up time for her and her only and covering half the length of a football field in an eyeblink. And firing again from behind the behemoth.
And this time, she hit.
One of the biggest limbs was erased in a storm of ash, and with the next blow, she tore a furrow across the huge head because it hadn’t quite knocked her spell aside fast enough. She disappeared again before another leg splashed down into the water where she’d been floating, and three more limbs vanished in seconds, with her firing while still in quick time. It was an impressive display, not least because it had taken maybe five seconds from our perspective.
Throughout training, I’d usually been eating Agnes’ dust, but as it turned out, I wasn’t so bad myself. I grinned. Wonder what two of us can do, I thought, preparing to join the fight—right before a spell flashed across my eyes.
I got a shield up in time—just—because I’d been trained to feel magic coming at me. When you’re blindfolded and surrounded by a bunch of gleeful initiates who have been given carte blanche to beat the hell out of you, you learn fast. I’d had welts on my body for days from that particular piece of fun, but it had sharpened my instincts considerably, as had the many subsequent repeats.
So, yeah, I got a shield up, but there wasn’t one spell coming at me; there were a dozen or more, all spattering the shield’s surface with a multitude of colors in the red-to-orange spectrum, cutting off my view. Somebody meant business, and apparently, I wasn’t dying fast enough to suit them. And then I was diving again and taking Alphonse with me because I had shielded him, too.
“Fuck!” he stared at me as we shot away underwater, using the debris field as cover once again. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“You have vampire eyes,” I snarled, already feeling the heat of the rapidly depleting air inside the shield, because I hadn’t made it big enough, damn it! “What direction?”
“Don’t know. Multiple. I didn’t know what was happening ‘till your shield closed over us, and the next second, the bastards were hitting us. But somebody’s got good aim.”
And they still did. We’d been close to the staircase, and the crowd clogging it, meaning the blows had probably come from there. We’d put some distance between us now, but the spell light followed us, blooming on the water’s surface like distant suns.
Or not so distant, as I felt the impact of several more blows and the subsequent drain on my power to support the shield. And considering that spells are like bullets in a way, namely that water usually stops them after a short distance, somebody was putting some power behind those bolts. Or using water magic for all I knew, which was nothing as I hadn’t studied elemental!
I’d barely had time to learn my brand of magic, but I did know it. Which was why I let the next spell penetrate the shield, just far enough for my magic to loop around it and catch hold. And then I did a return to sender that would have made Gertie proud.
I didn’t hear anybody scream because everyone was, but the attack abruptly cut out, allowing Alphonse and me to surface. I watched water bead on my shield and stared around, looking for another problem. Only we didn’t find one—except for the massive monster that was trashing the room and, a moment later, took out the surviving lights overhead.
Someone had gotten smart and spelled them to shine directly into its one eye, or maybe they were designed that way, to highlight whatever the big deal was at the moment. Either way, our current big deal didn’t like that and had swiped them off the ceiling with one gigantic arm, plunging them into the depths and us into darkness. For about ten seconds, I blinked with only multicolored after-effects strobing my vision.
And then we got a new and much more deadly form of light.
Pritkin took advantage of the cover of darkness and started throwing firebolts like they were going out of style while constantly moving, having the creature attack where he’d just been and where the residual spell light was still lighting up the night. But the creature’s spell resistance threw off the effects of some of the blasts, and it dodged the rest. Until he hurled something substantially bigger, something that had all the staring faces around the hall illuminated in bright red, including that of the creature.
Which flung up an arm at the last second to save itself, and spell-resistance or no, the massive limb promptly burst into flames.
“Looks like it’s got a new enemy number one,” Alphonse said, as it started after Pritkin, not by finding him but by using the telescoping tentacles to attack on all sides, all at once.
So, I sent a bolt of the Pythian power in an attempt to regain my title, but barely clipped it because those arms were moving like lightning. And it seemed to be able to sense magic, too, anticipating my bolt. But a time spell from the other direction finished the giant arm off, with my doppelganger coming in clutch and then yelping when the creature turned on her in a fury.
I heard my voice abruptly cut off, and a second later, the other half of my soul slammed back into me like a freight train, indicating my spell’s demise. My double must have dropped her shield to up her firepower, and it had been a mistake. One that caused me to stagger as my two halves knitted themselves back together, something almost as uncomfortable as the ripping apart had been.
And then I heard Pritkin scream.
My head jerked up because that was not normal. Pritkin could be loud, and I’d heard enough yelling, bitching and weird profanity from him to fill a good-sized library. But he didn’t scream, and certainly not like that.
For a moment, I feared the worst. But then a fury of spells, more than I could hope to count, exploded around the creature all at once, lighting it up in a red, orange, and yellow halo. It looked like a fireworks display where someone had misjudged the timing and let everything off at once, so bright and breakneck that I could barely even see.
And when I could, it was to notice what had to be a hundred levitating weapons silhouetted against the brilliance, which I guessed Pritkin must have spelled on the fly because he hadn’t had them in that skin-tight suit. But they were there now, and the creature couldn’t anticipate them as easily.
The little magic they used was lost in the flood around the room from people’s protection spells, the guys working on getting the patchy ward to solidify, and others banishing water from the room before we all drowned.
So, no, it couldn’t spot them all, and as a result, it was getting skewered, as well as fried from the spell light suddenly crawling all over its body. It looked as if an entire war mage battalion had descended onto the place, but they hadn’t. It was just one man.
A man who believed I was dead, I realized with a lurch; he thought my doppelganger had been me.
“He’s going HAM,” Alphonse said, sounding impressed. “And he better hope it works, or that thing’s gonna kill him as soon as his magic runs out.”
And it would because no one could sustain something like that for long, even Pritkin.
“Like hell,” I gasped, the light, heat, and burning stench from the battle making me dizzy. But dizzy or not, we weren’t going out like this. Not as freaking after-dinner entertainment for this bunch of bastards!
“Over here!” I screamed, magically enhancing my voice, to the point that it echoed deafeningly round the space. “Hey, big boy! You’re looking in the wrong place!”
I didn’t know whether it could understand English or if the sheer volume was enough. But it got the idea. And whirled with an almost comical look of shock as if to say: “Didn’t I kill you already?”
“Try again,” I told it grimly as Alphonse cursed. Because immediately, a burning, furious, possibly elder god was storming our way in a cyclone of murderous limbs and spurting black acid.
And, okay, yeah.
That had worked.
“I hate you,” Alphonse said and plunged us underwater again.
The screaming cut out, more or less, except for the sound of the merpeople screeching in their strange language. It didn’t sound happy, and neither was I, as tentacles of all sizes started stabbing down all around us, sloshing tables everywhere as they followed us through the water, vampire speed notwithstanding. I should have worn something less shiny, I thought, right before my outfit abruptly went dark.
Thank you, Augustine, I thought fervently, thinking of the part-fey designer who had made my current ensemble. He charged a fortune but was worth every penny and was partly how I managed to evade getting ground against the floor. The other part was Alphonse, who shoved me away and went thrashing in the other direction, and considering how smoothly he’d been swimming before, I had to assume that was deliberate.
I broke through the water, gasping and exhausted. Swimming in armor, even the ultralightweight dragon scale variety, is not fun. And neither was that, I thought, turning to see Pritkin, Alphonse, and the silver-haired fey each wrapped in a giant arm and getting smashed into anything and everything the creature could find.
Pritkin still had his shield up and was firing between blows, but it looked like the pounding was throwing off his aim. Alphonse, who was immobilized except for his head, appeared to be trying to gnaw the creature’s arm off but had a long way to go. And the silver-haired fey still had one arm loose and was stabbing whatever he could find with his sword in between getting slammed against floating debris, the stairs, the ceiling, and the nearby wall.
The only good news was that the guards had started to remember that they were actually supposed to guard things instead of standing around looking pretty. And at least some of those who had run off had come back with a chest of potion bombs that appeared to be causing the behemoth some distress. I couldn’t be sure, as it remained eerily silent, with the only sound coming from the remaining crowd because the flying debris the creature was flinging at the guards was also hitting them.
But behemoth was looking the worse for the wear himself, with noticeable gaps in the forest of arms, a missing eye, and burn marks all over its huge head. Which had turned to look at the ward as if it was thinking of getting the hell out of Dodge. Only it couldn’t, as the room’s protection was back up, Nimue’s magic workers having earned their money twice over tonight, so it had nowhere to go.
Neither did I, and I was woozy and exhausted. Even worse, I was learning to tell when the portal was about to cycle away as my power started to thin. I had time for one more blast of dubious quality, but I had to take it now.
So, I did, throwing everything I could muster at the only target that made sense: the reinvigorated ward.
That gave the creature an escape route in case it was as tired of this fight as I was and just wanted out. I couldn’t tell if it did because a new wall of water hit me a moment later, slamming me back against a mass of floating tables and chairs that had washed up together like a beaver dam. And by the time I dragged my battered body out of all that wood, I still couldn’t see much as the lights remained out.
The only illumination was cascading through the flung wide main doors at the top of the staircases, which the crowd had mostly blocked before but which was clear now that they’d fled.
What happened, I thought dizzily, staring around, right before Pritkin grabbed me. And shook me like a maraca while screeching something I couldn’t make out because my ears were full of water. But the shaking took care of that in a minute, and they popped, only to immediately get assaulted in a new way.
“Answer me, goddamnit!”
I didn’t know the question, but I nodded because there was a terrible expression on his face that I’d never seen before. And because I was still trying to cough up enough water to be able to speak. And I guess that was good enough.
“Alphonse!” he yelled.
“Yo,” the voice came from somewhere near the stairs.
I stared at the big guy, half in disbelief, because he was okay. He looked okay! And then back at Pritkin and me, who were still somehow in one piece.
Battered and bloody, but in one piece!
“We made it,” I said, wonder in my breathless voice. “We all . . . made it.”
“We did,” Pritkin’s tone was as grim as I’d ever heard. “But the Svarestri heir was just carried out to sea.”