Chapter Sixteen
A lphonse jumped in front of me just in time, as half of a silver sword was suddenly sticking out of his back. I stared at it, having no choice being only inches away, with the dark blood of a master dripping off the end pointed directly between my eyes. And then I was backing up, and Alphonse was pulling the sword out with a growl and attempting to stick it into the fey who had tried to skewer me.
Only I wasn’t sure which one that was as there were suddenly a lot of them. Alphonse’s new sword rang on no less than three others, and there were plenty more muscling into the room behind them. It felt like another tide was swamping us, this one made out of flesh.
Alphonse was shoving me toward the rear exit while slashing at whoever tried to get behind him. But the door I’d glimpsed earlier was blocked by a bunch of what looked like beer barrels. They were full and heavy, but I was motivated and started shoving them aside to make an exit, and nobody got past Alphonse, possibly because Pritkin, Rhosier, and the kitchen maid Enid were lighting up our attackers.
The invading horde found themselves met by a barrage of spells that it didn’t look like they’d expected, as some of them hadn’t even had shields up when they came in. And when you’re dealing with the kind of magic that Pritkin was able to put out, that was ill-advised. As demonstrated when one of them went up like a Roman candle, burning to death inside his expensive suit of armor.
Within seconds, liquid fat was gushing out of the joints, the acrid smell of burning meat filled the air, and shields bloomed everywhere. And I moved the last barrel, grunting in effort before turning around to yell at the others and tell them to fall back. Fall back and let’s get out of here!
Only I didn’t get the chance. I was abruptly shoved against the still-closed door by the blue surface of a ward, hard as glass, which had pushed past my defender and pinned me to the wall like a bug on a pin. It barely gave me a chance to breathe, much less to get the damned thing behind me open!
“Get out!” Alphonse yelled as I was squeezed so tightly by the ward that fighting was impossible. “Shift! Shift!”
Yeah, only I couldn’t right now, but I had no way to explain that to him as I also couldn’t drag in enough air to speak. Just as he couldn’t reach me past the shield between us. Which the fey who had cast it was now walking through because it was his shield; it didn’t bind him. He had a naked sword in his hand, and I was unable to move or even turn my head enough to get a good look at the guy who was about to kill me.
Desperate, I tried the first spell I’d ever mastered back when I was at Tony’s. It drew on my magic, not the Pythian variety, and it still worked. A rune floated up into the air, almost in the fey’s face, causing him to grab at it as if it was a tangible thing.
And at the same moment, a burst of strength hit me, flooding down my arms to my fingertips and making me feel like I could run two marathons back to back. And I had better. Because when its effects wore off, I would be out of it for days, as the spell concentrated every bit of energy I had into one short-lived burst.
That meant I was screwed for tomorrow’s challenge, but if I died in here, I wasn’t making it anyway. And it looked like I still wouldn’t because, even after putting everything I had into it, I didn’t budge! And then somebody started shrieking.
It wasn’t the fleshy candle guy who had never had the chance. It wasn’t our waitress, who had been screaming since the horde came in, although at a much lower decibel level. It wasn’t even human.
And it was preceded by a stench so bad, so eye-watering, so throat-closing and head swimming, that the fey who was about to gut me looked back for a second in disbelief. And my hand, which had been fumbling around the door behind me, finally grasped the latch. And slid the bolt back, feeling like I broke my wrist in the process, but not caring because it worked!
I stumbled into a small stone hallway so quickly that my butt hit the floor. The fey could have followed me, but he was too bust scrabbling at his gorget with a mailed fist, like he couldn’t breathe, either. And then it got worse.
The familiar reek of the Horror Twins hit me, causing my eyes to flood and my throat to seize up. And to keep on doing it to the point that it felt puckered because they’d cranked the stench up to eleven. Alphonse had been right, I thought, as my attacker and I clawed at our necks almost in unison; that stench was a bioweapon, and one he was suddenly way more worried about than me.
I scrambled back, heart thudding, lungs screaming, eyes watering so much that I could hardly see. So I didn’t know what was going on in there, just that a bunch of people had started hitting the walls, very fast and very hard. I also learned that what I’d thought of as Pinkie’s shrillness was nothing to what he could do when really pissed off, as it sounded like a few dozen soprano air horns were going off in my ears, increasing the confusion.
Then Pritkin grabbed my hand while I was still trying to get back to my feet and towed me down the hall, just ahead of a rolling tide of fey, demons, and what appeared to be a bunch of the kitchen staff, all trying to fit through the door at once.
I didn’t recognize the fey from dinner, and I should have if they’d been there, as they were hard to miss. Their dark hair was stained purple in a wide swath along the bottom as if they’d dipped it in a bucket of paint, and they wore flashy purple robes over expensive-looking dragon-scale armor. But the kitchen help were a lot more familiar, still in their stained aprons and sooty loincloths.
But instead of trying to grab the redheads and flee as I’d have expected, they were actively attacking the startled-looking light fey, who didn’t seem to have expected that any more than I had. I also didn’t expect it to work because the kitchen help were armed with pots, pans, and old carving knives against people in elite-tier protection. But there were a lot of them, and they seemed unusually strong, magically speaking, just like the kitchen maid had been.
They also weren’t taking prisoners.
“Kill them! Kill the bastards!” Rhosier was yelling like a maniac, and they were damned well trying.
I saw a group of five gang up on one of our attackers as Pritkin dragged me down the hall, and recognized him as the half-asphyxiated fey who had attacked me. And whose armor now ran in a rainbow of sizzling colors. He screamed, having had to drop his shield to fit in here, as the hallway was very narrow.
It hadn’t been a great idea, as demonstrated when he collapsed to his knees, a mountain of attackers on top of him. Yet the kitchen staff were taking hits, too. I saw one of the breadbakers hit the floor and hoped she was dead by the time she did so, as a spell was literally eating her alive.
In a couple of seconds, she looked like a filleted fish, with nothing but ribs and a smoking spine still identifiable. I stared at her in horror for a second until a welt of warm, sticky blood hit me as one of the spit-turners staggered back. He collapsed, his torso slashed to pieces, even though he had had a shield up, but the fey’s blades were enchanted and had carved right through.
I slipped on someone’s blood and went down, and a forest of those enchanted blades followed me. But they were stopped inches away from my head by the ward Pritkin threw over us. Instead, the same sword that had gutted the spit-turner bounced off with all of the wielder’s momentum behind it, sending him staggering back into a group of others and spilling them to the ground.
And the spells his friends behind them threw in retaliation did the same, ricocheting off our protection and dropping half of them. It didn’t look like they’d dealt with demon armor before. Or knew what to do with it now.
But I didn’t know how long the shield would last, as Pritkin had to be drawing on some of that stolen power he’d absorbed from the fey who had kidnapped me. He’d drained them dry, carving a path for me out of that infernal camp. But he was facing what looked like a platoon and had to stretch his shield to cover two.
I should have stayed put, I thought blankly. I should have done what he said and kept my ass in the room and trusted him to know more about this place than I did. Instead, I’d been too busy trying to prove that I could be an asset and had only managed to turn myself into a major liability.
If he died because of me. . .
And he very well might because the fey were still coming.
They’d trampled their fallen underfoot and kept advancing, maybe out of courage or because they had no choice. Not with the Horror Twins pushing into the chamber behind them and unwittingly shoving everyone this way. They were stuck choosing the lesser of two evils, and I guessed that was us because they were coming and coming hard, their weapons ringing loudly on our protection as they hacked away at the ward’s surface.
And then we were jumped by three more fey coming from the other direction that neither of us had seen, being too busy looking at the ones pursuing us.
I had a wild cascade of images hit me all at once: Pritkin under a brutal assault, with his shields up but thinning quickly; Alphonse down the hall with a fey under each arm, one of whom was stabbing him in the back repeatedly with a wicked looking knife; Enid fighting several fey at once and looking terrified and exhausted and furious, all at once; and her sister, being thrown over a guard’s shoulder, her body hanging limply.
Blood was everywhere, the metallic smell of it in my nose, the sight of it splattering the walls and flying through the air to splash my shield, the warm, sticky feel of it sliding beneath my bare feet. And the fact that I could feel it against my soles meant that Pritkin’s shield was dangerously thin. He was going to kill himself protecting me, and that wasn’t the plan!
At least it wasn’t mine, but it looked like someone else’s.
I stepped through the disintegrating shield, allowing it to shink closer to his body to protect him better, and was immediately confronted by the front dozen or so fey coming from the storeroom. Who, for some reason, suddenly weren’t attacking anymore. They threw up shields instead, despite there being no room for them, why I didn’t know.
Until it hit me: they thought I’d come out from behind the shield because I was about to attack. I wasn’t; I just didn’t see any reason for us both to die when he might be able to survive without me, but the fey didn’t know that. It was a shock; the idea of being considered scary by our enemies was still new and strange, but it must have been the case.
Because when I abruptly raised a hand, they collectively flinched back.
It wasn’t a complete bluff. I had a bracelet with two ghostly daggers I’d taken off a dark mage once, which I unleashed as I had nothing else. They were usually too dangerous to use, as they didn’t always follow orders very well, if at all. But right now, that didn’t matter.
Right now, buying a couple more seconds was good enough.
My blades started sparking off the fey armor all in a line, zigzagging back and forth in front of me like the manic things they were. They couldn’t get through the shields plus armor and wouldn’t last, as Earth magic rarely did for long in Faerie. But they’d spooked the fey, who were used to the kind of magic Nimue could summon, and suddenly, there was panic all around.
The ones in front were suddenly fighting like hell with their brothers to get out of the way. They’d clearly decided that the tip of the spear gets blunted and that they’d prefer to be farther down the blade. Or out of the hallway entirely, in this case, where there was nowhere to go.
But their brothers-in-arms thought the same, and the panicked fey were getting pushed back at me like the fight behind us was hemming me in. And was growing as more soldiers had joined from that direction, leaving us caught between a rock and a death place. But then Pritkin looked around wildly, spotted me hugging the wall, and realized why his shield was still up—
And took out his fury at me on the fey.
A moment later, half a dozen fey were dead courtesy of a couple of spells that burned through them, armor and all, and took out two who were either braver or dumber than the rest and were lunging at me. But he’d had to drop his shields and use their remaining strength to do it, and it didn’t look like he could raise them again. Which was a problem since somebody had just thrown a spell that took out half the ceiling.
And suddenly, here they came, everyone still on their feet. Whether trying to dodge the rock fall, because shields were suddenly getting smashed by giant falling boulders and debris, or just panicked, I didn’t know. But it was all the same to us because we couldn’t handle that.
With no shields, we were about to be ground underfoot by friend and foe alike.
And we would have been, except that my power took that moment to come surging back, engulfing me in a glittering wave I could feel in every frantic heartbeat. I dragged it to me, hugging it like a cloak in a snowstorm for a second before sending it back out again in a blast that rippled down the corridor like a sound wave. Only it wasn’t just sound that froze as solid as if a new Ice Age had arrived.
Abruptly, everything cut out: screams chopped off halfway through; raised, bloodied fists stopped partway through their arc; falling boulders arrested in the air along with a great billow of dust; and wild eyes gleamed in the sudden stillness with no thought behind them.
Because the brains they were attached to were on pause like everything else.
Even the smell had mostly cut out, as the air molecules weren’t whizzing around carrying it anymore. I gasped in a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding and stumbled backward out of the spell, my ears ringing in the sudden silence. Which was why Pritkin’s shouted “Cassie!” almost deafened me.
I didn’t answer.
I couldn’t answer.
My knees wobbled, and I would have fallen, the punch of using that particular spell after the day I’d had immediately wiping me out. Only the artificial strength that my human spell had bought me kept me upright and had allowed me to cast the thing at all. But it was fighting the nausea of that much exertion all at once like somebody suddenly deciding to race halfway up Everest.
I found myself having to fight to breathe, with my heart about to beat through my chest and spots whirling in front of my eyes. My knees buckled, and I staggered against the wall, feeling like I’d taken a punch to the gut. Pritkin grabbed me as he wasn’t frozen, having been behind me when I cast my spell, along with a lot of dead men.
And a lone fey, pretending to be dead, waiting for his moment to strike.
I guessed he decided that was it, only to encounter a magically enhanced blow from my companion hard enough to knock him out, even through the dragonscale helmet he wore. He went down, and I just stared at him, the room pulsing around me and threatening to telescope right out of existence. But Pritkin wouldn’t let it.
He grabbed me, yelling something I couldn’t concentrate on with my blood roaring like Niagra Falls in my ears. And then while I puked my guts out all over the floor, gasped for breath, and did it again. So much for the pie, I thought blearily, as Pritkin yelled, “—how long?”
Because yeah, we weren’t out of this yet.
“Not long,” I gasped because even enhanced strength wasn’t much when I was already sitting on empty. “Maybe . . . a couple of minutes?”
“Fuck!”
He waded into the frozen tableaux, which looked like something from a Renaissance painting. I leaned against the wall, exhausted and barely conscious, watching the people on the peripheries of my spell start to move in slow motion. A fist connected with a jaw, sending ripples through the flesh and splitting the lip, causing ruby droplets to spill out into the air; an older kitchen maid, one with salt and pepper hair and a rolling pin, cursed a fancy guard so hard that his face cracked as I watched, like the dirt in a long dry lake bed, with red lines blooming between pieces of flesh; and a spray of blood slowly fountained outward from a knife plunged into a neck.
They were already throwing off my spell, and the rest would follow soon. We needed to go. Only I wasn’t sure if I could even manage a stagger.
Pritkin dragged over Rhosier, who had a knife in his side and a bloom of blood on his clothes. I didn’t ask what he wanted; I already knew. I gathered what strength remained to me, took the cook’s hand, and looked at Pritkin.
“He’s going to be . . . in a world of hurt . . . when he comes out.”
“We all will be if he doesn’t.”
It was grim enough that I didn’t ask what that meant; I just tightened my grip on the guy’s arm and pulled . It felt like the threads of my spell pulled back for a moment, fighting me. Or maybe my grip was just that weak. I renewed it and jerked , and yanked, and dragged the cook back into real-time what felt like bodily and—
And that was it, that was all I knew, with a sea of gray fog rolling over me like the tide.