Chapter Thirty
I hit the ground hard as if falling from a height and landed in what felt like a bowl of cold mud. As stunned as I was, I couldn’t tell much more than that, but I wouldn’t have been able to anyway, as it was also dark. A second ago, it had been broad daylight, with a raucous, shouting crowd in every color of the rainbow under a brilliantly blue sky, but now. . .
My eyes registered only pitch black, and my ears, still ringing from all those cheers, picked up nothing past the echoes except eerie silence. I swallowed, my mouth strangely cottony, and stayed put, trying to get my bearings. I thought I heard a faint trickle of water from somewhere, along with the sound of the wind.
That was it.
That was all.
It didn’t help.
And neither did this, I thought, as I started squelching around, trying to find purchase on the spongy ground and mostly failing. The mud felt like it went all the way down, with no firm bottom anywhere. That left me less crawling than swimming, although that might have had more to do with the state of my head than the muck.
Something was wrong with me—something was wrong, period. I could feel it, shuddering through my body like the grip of a giant’s hand. An evil giant who was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing all of the air out of my lungs, making me squirm and thrash and beat against what felt like a skin on the air.
I had a sudden image of a baby, caught in an intact amniotic sac, staring out at a world it couldn’t touch. Only I could, I would , whether this spell liked it or not. I was Pythia, damn it!
And the spell had a name.
Illusion, I thought, growing furious. Pritkin had said that the water fey were better at them than anyone else, but I’d been trained for this, as a Pythia who couldn’t tell the difference between reality and illusion was a danger to everyone. That was why I’d spent the better part of two weeks stumbling around from one illusion to another as Gertie and company tried their best to trip me up.
And had me screaming in terror when my bed was suddenly floating on a rising tide despite being on the second floor of the London court. Or stopping, dropping, and rolling because my ugly lace gown was abruptly on fire. Or shifting a dozen snarling Weres, who raced into the front hall one night just after I returned from a mission.
Fortunately, I’d been too exhausted to send them far because they’d turned out to be real and were less than happy about their sudden relocation to the roof. Especially since it was night, rain was bucketing down, and lightning hit the rod designed for such things above their heads a moment later, hard enough to make their hair stand on end. And continue to do so while everything was sorted out, leaving them looking like murderous puff balls.
Gertie had been in a long-running feud with one of the local clans, and they’d decided to visit in force without an invitation, which was a no-no. So I didn’t get in trouble. Other than for being unable to tell the difference between illusion and reality.
“But you will,” she’d said, an evil glimmer in her eyes.
And I had, the hard way. Which was how I did everything, it seemed, but hard times make hard women. So no illusion . . . was going to . . . hold me . . . goddamnit!
And it didn’t. One second, I was punching my way through what felt like eighty layers of plastic wrap, feeling like a suffocating mummy drowning in mud. And the next—
I was still drowning in mud because I had somehow buried my face in it.
I came up gasping, expecting to see water, light, and color after shattering the illusion, or at least the shins of the people fighting around me. Instead, I saw . . . nothing. Or nothing different, at least.
It was still dark, the mud was still gritty, and the night was still cold. Except that it suddenly felt more real somehow, more solid, more there than a minute ago. And the suffocating sensation had been replaced by the sweet feeling of air rushing into my lungs, filling them up with an almost heady surge of—
Someone else was there, too.
I froze, all that wonderful oxygen catching in my throat. One of my senses—I couldn’t have said which one—had picked something up, enough to shout a warning. But now there was nothing, just more wind whistling overhead but not hitting my skin as if it was being blocked somehow.
But not by a ward. Most of my stolen power had gone into the race, and what I had left wouldn’t fuel any protection for long. Not against the kind of magic the fey could manifest.
But damn, did I wish it could!
I stared around, not understanding anything. But at least my eyes were adjusting a little, allowing me to see a few scattered stars overhead. And the fact that they were blocked in places by what might have been cliffs. The cliffs were indistinct voids cut out of the starscape, but as I concentrated, the faint, silvery light from above highlighted pieces of their craggy surfaces.
There was nothing farther down, toward what should have been the base of the cliffs, and I slowly realized why. The silvery threads of an almost dried-up waterfall were dribbling into a basin—one that had been a pool a few moments ago but was now a mud pit with its sides blocking the view beyond. Because I hadn’t changed locations, had I?
I’d changed times . And then it all came rushing back, the desperate fight inside the churning pool, the exhilaration of seeing Pritkin defy the odds and cross the finish line first, the glimpse of Tony’s fat face. The time spell that hadn’t been mine but which had caught me anyway—
My head jerked around, hearing the sound of light, running feet in a place that shouldn’t have had them—that couldn’t have them if they were human, as this mud wouldn’t hold one of us up. And then I was floundering more quickly, trying to get to my feet before that son of a bitch finished me off. Only to get taken down a second later—
By an enraged prince of the light fey.
I’d expected Tony for obvious reasons, but the starlight was glimmering off of silver dragonscale, long hair almost the same color, and a beautiful, furious face. ?subrand—I’d nearly forgotten about him. But the same wasn’t true in reverse, as he demonstrated by flipping around like a monkey and getting me into another headlock.
That would have been it, but I’d had those few seconds of warning thanks to the squelching mud and used them to manifest my whip. Which I flung backward at the bastard imprisoning me because I’d never been all that great at defense. Not that offense worked much better, with my opponent having the reflexes of a cat on steroids.
But so did my whip, and it seemed to have a mind of its own.
He released me after the third time it gouged his pretty armor deep enough to crack it and lunged backward, his breastplate falling off and the glowing tip missing his unprotected chest by millimeters. And then he dodged from side to side as the lethal golden stream slashed out again and again, like the tongue of a massive snake. Anyone else would have run for their lives or at least for cover, but did he take the wise course?
Oh, hell no. He ducked and darted, dodged and zigzagged, and somehow returned to his feet in the middle of all that. And kept.
On.
Coming.
But others were coming now, too, a bunch of them drawn by the sounds of battle and the flashing light that my whip gave off. It was strobing the ugly, muddy scene, highlighting the churned-up soil, the fury on ?subrand’s face, and the flash of red in the eyes of the woman who took him down, even while glaring daggers at me. Bodil, I realized, wondering why she kept saving me and who else had been sucked into this.
And then somebody grabbed me, vampire quick, only to have Pritkin come out of nowhere and tackle him. The two combatants fell into the mud, beating the hell out of each other, while ?subrand elbowed Bodil in the gut and tore free. And came straight back at me.
Only to splat face-first onto a shield I hadn’t put up and didn’t think that Pritkin had, either, as he and a hulking shadow I finally recognized as Alphonse were still trying to kill each other. Until someone lit a wand, showing them that they were fighting the wrong guy. And lighting up a familiar redhead with a scarred face, who I guessed was my most recent savior because she grabbed me.
“I was in the water,” Enid said frantically. “And then I was here, but I couldn’t move! I could barely breathe and thought I was dying! That someone had spelled me—”
“Yeah, I thought the—”
“—but the paralysis vanished as suddenly as it had come, and I was on my way back to my feet when I heard—”
She broke off suddenly, terror flooding those usually staunch features, and I didn’t have to ask why. Something echoed through the night, a stuttering, haunting cry that was horribly familiar and no, no, no! I hadn’t even dealt with the current crisis yet!
But I had a new one, ready or not. And everyone else seemed to sense that, too, their heads jerking up. And freezing in place, even ?subrand, who looked confused, probably wondering what he was feeling. Had I dared to speak, I could have told him: the same thing a mouse felt when a hawk glided overhead.
“Shhh!” I hissed, extinguishing my whip, but nobody shhhed.
Quite the contrary. Once their paralysis broke, right about the time that terrible cry petered out, they all tried to talk at once. And that was a problem—that was a big problem—because someone else was out there.
Or make that some thing , I thought, my spine crawling as another stuttering cry tore through the night, closer this time. I knew those sounds. They’d featured in my nightmares often enough.
“Shut up!” I hissed, and we all hunkered down. Even ?subrand, although he was breathing hard and trying to maneuver his way over to me, probably to gut me while we hid from what was out there. Which would lead them right to us because—
“They scent blood,” Pritkin whispered before I could, probably hoping it would cause the princely idiot to pause and think for a minute, something he seemed to have trouble doing when enraged. And it might have—if it hadn’t been Pritkin speaking.
I guessed ?subrand hadn’t noticed his chief rival before, probably being too focused on me. But he saw him now and immediately launched himself at him, a wicked-looking dagger glinting in the starlight for half a second. Until Pritkin and Alphonse took him down, although he fought like a tiger.
A seriously stupid one who was about to get us all killed!
“Muffle him!” I whispered and I guessed they did because I didn’t hear anything else.
Except for that, I thought, as several somethings from different directions gave a combined cry that echoed off the sides of the old lake bed and etched its way down my bones. I couldn’t see them as the steep embankment still blocked my view. But a recent memory gave me an image anyway.
Not of what they looked like because they could look like anything. But of what they were: eldritch monsters that everyday demons called “Ancient Horrors” because they didn’t have a better description. And because it really, really fit.
The Ancient Horrors were old demons, powerful ones, practically primordial ones who the Demon High Council had long ago locked away on some barren worlds and left to die. Only they hadn’t died. They had gotten seriously pissed off, however, and once Zeus showed up with an offer of alliance, they’d taken it gleefully.
Most recently, they’d possessed the bodies of some vamps in old Romania, where Zeus had intended for them to ravage the world’s vampire senates in the past, thus winning him the war before it started by drastically weakening our side. My court and I had denied him that, and Adra and the council’s demons had killed the Horrors he had selected for the mission. We’d already killed some of them at the battle for Issengeir, Aeslinn’s southern capital, where they’d been stuffed into the bodies of rock-like manlikans to help with the city’s defenses.
I’d hoped that, together, those battles had gotten them all.
Guessed not.
A silence spell clicked shut around us, and it must have been Bodul’s work because a second later, she was in my face. “What is that?” she demanded. “Where are we? How are we here? What did you do? ”
The rapid-fire questions reminded me of the ones I’d asked her back in the stable, none of which she’d answered. I would have been more obliging, but there was no time. The predators after us sensed magic as quickly as blood, as I’d learned the hard way once.
And preferred not to learn again!
“Drop the spell,” I told her. “Do it now.”
“Are you mad?”
“No! And do what I tell you, or we’re all about to die!” And unlike ?subrand, she appeared to be able to think past her anger because she dropped the spell. “No magic,” I whispered. “No blood. And do what I do.”
I ducked into the mud, rolling to get it over the few parts of my face, hair, and neck that were still clean and shedding scent. And then I started crawling—fast. The others followed because more and more sounds were echoing through the night, horrible, skin-ruffling noises that were like nothing on Earth.
Or in Faerie, either, I assumed, since Bodil was also taking a mud bath while we crawled. And looking around with a furtiveness that she probably hadn’t shown in a few millennia. I just crawled faster because we needed to get away from where we’d been, and we needed to do it now.
I’d no sooner had the thought than something with brilliant yellow eyes peered over the edge of the pool. I couldn’t see anything else except a shadow against the night, and I was good with that. If I never saw another of those things again—
But I was going to because one person hadn’t followed my commands. One person had stood up, his silver clothing shining in the starlight like it was made out of the stuff, and pulled out a sword. A sword that would do exactly nothing, no matter how pretty it was.
I’d seen one of those creatures gut an ancient demigoddess who was a hell of a lot scarier than him. Only one thing worked on them, and he didn’t have it. Son of a bitch !
“Get them away,” I whispered to Pritkin, who had crawled up beside me.
“Do you know what those are?” he hissed because, yeah, I didn’t have to explain it to him. He’d gone with Adra to check out the demon prison worlds and found their population largely missing.
“Yes! And I can’t shift you all!”
“Leave that fucker!” Alphonse growled at me while glancing back at ?subrand, but I couldn’t.
Fey bodies were almost as resilient as vampire ones, and I knew his fate if they caught him. He’d be lucky if they just ate him. Really lucky, I thought, my mind flashing back to the vampire bodies I’d seen in Wales, which the Horrors had invaded and then fused to make themselves even more deadly forms.
Some of the bloated results had looked like a rat king by the time they’d finished, only far more terrible. I still had nightmares about a pair of horrified blue eyes floating in a prison of flesh that had once been his body and was now just part of a demon construct. One that wasn’t reversible.
The demons would use their fleshy tanks in battle then discard them and find new patsies. But he was trapped like that permanently, along with whoever else’s bodies had been commandeered and morphed out of all recognition. And as bad as ?subrand might be, no one deserved that.
“Go!” I told them, and for a wonder, they went. And dragged Enid and Bodil along with them, just as something hideous and multilegged was silhouetted against the starlight as it jumped into the mud.
And was met halfway through the arc by my whip, which was thinner now and not nearly so impressive-looking. But which nonetheless spilled the creature’s guts all over the haughty fey prince. Who turned on me savagely.
“I don’t need—” he began right before the wounded creature lunged for me, trailing half its entrails through the mud but not caring. And allowing me to see it clearly for the first time, only my eyes couldn’t quite manage to focus.
Maybe that was a self-defense mechanism because what I could see was so hideous that it broke my brain. I realized I’d never seen one of them in their natural state unless you counted a snake-like version that Pritkin and I had fought what felt like ages ago and which must have been the beauty pageant winner. Because this. . .
“Augghh!” I whispered, the visceral No! having to come out somehow. But it was pitifully inadequate because the thing was . . . the thing was . . .
The thing was on me.