Chapter Thirty-Nine
G ive us a minute,” I told Bodil, my lips numb, and for once, she obliged.
We walked further away from the group, none of whom seemed to know what to think about what they’d just heard. And, frankly, neither did I. With Pritkin’s family trait on his side, Zeus would be unbeatable, absolutely unbeatable.
It was something that Pritkin knew better than I did because, despite his disclaimers, he was looking sick. “I should have told you,” he said, facing the far wall. “When we were sitting by the canal. I almost did—”
“That’s when you realized.”
He nodded. “There was no time before that; everything was too confused. And once I did—”
He turned to me, and his face was terrible.
“We don’t know what happened,” I began.
He gestured around wildly when Pritkin never did. “I think we do!”
“We know Zeus brought the gods back, but not how. Your incubus is still you; he wouldn’t be easy to catch—”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
“I’m trying to make sense of this!”
“There’s no sense to make!” It was savage. “Except for the one fact neither of us has wanted to face: I’m not up to this. I never have been—”
“Faerie thinks you are—”
“Faerie can’t even save her own world! She’s walking around in a dead girl’s corpse, clutching at straws! Recruiting any and everyone she thought might be able to help her. And somehow, against all odds, you and Mircea completed two impossible tasks. But the third. . .
“That was on me, and I failed .”
I tried to say something, but the man who never talked was talking now as if he couldn’t stop. “What you said earlier about someone who keeps going despite the struggles, the risk? That describes you , not me. Do you know what I did, the last time things were this hard? I hid away, became a hermit, then took a job blowing things up. And now—”
He stared at me, and his eyes were terrible. “Cassie. I’ve destroyed two worlds.”
“ You haven’t. Zeus did—”
“With my help.”
“We don’t know that! And even if we did, that’s still on him!”
“No, it’s on me. I could have taken myself out of the equation, vanishing into the hells or . . . by other means. And I should have as soon as I knew what Zeus wanted from me. But I wanted—” His hand came up and clutched my shoulder, but not as he usually did. But barely there, as if he didn’t think he had the right. “I wanted you. I wanted a life for us, and I wanted it so badly I made myself blind to the risks. I even came here when—”
He laughed, although there was no mirth in it. “When I knew, if I lost, it might end up costing us the war, and if I won . . . I would get a throne I don’t want and responsibilities I can’t handle.”
He shook his head. “How can I be a good king when I can’t even keep you safe?”
I covered his hand with mine and pressed down hard enough for him to feel it. “You’re not responsible for that—or for this. And you’ve done an amazing job ever since you came here, and against ridiculous odds. Neither of us knew how hard this was going to be—”
“I knew. And I have bumbled about, barely keeping my head above water. I would have been trapped by my other half, possibly permanently, if you hadn’t come up with a way to free me, and before that, Feltin’s men had us well and truly cornered in that hallway. We wouldn’t have gotten out of the kitchens if you hadn’t bought us time.”
“And I would be dead if you hadn’t saved me in the dining hall and again in the corridor,” I said, frustrated. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you—we work better together. We’re practically unstoppable together! Only Zeus’s spell was working against us.”
And Pritkin’s insecurities, which were worse than I’d realized. No wonder the spell had taken him so hard. It had had the perfect in, the ideal path through the shields of the most dangerous man I knew. Who inside was still the little boy that nobody wanted, the child who had grown up alone because his grandmother tried to kill him, his mother feared getting near him, and his father was waiting until he grew up to see if he’d be worth his time.
He’d been little better off than the slaves here, maturing on a farm where the house and pigsty didn’t look that different, and forced to make a life with little help from anyone—a life that had been jerked away from him time and time and time again. Until suddenly, one day, somebody wanted to put a crown on his head, not because they thought he deserved it, although he did more than the rest of them put together! But in a desperate bid to prop up a failing system.
A system he wanted no part of but which he had braved anyway . . . for me.
“We’re better together,” I told him tearfully. “We always have been. And we will find a way out of this. But I can’t do this alone; I need you, I need every ounce of your strength, and I need—”
More time, I thought, but we’d had all we were going to get, because our other problem took that moment to arrive, blowing through the enormous main doors and sending them spinning halfway across the expanse of polished floor.
And ready or not, here they came.
“Into the water!” someone yelled, but it was already too late, although not because of the creatures fighting each other to get in the room. But because of something even more immediate.
Suddenly, bodies were falling everywhere, like a hideous rain. One splatted in front of me, a fur-covered nightmare with five or six rows of teeth in its misshapen jaw that would have had me screaming in horror, except that it was dead. As a doornail, I thought, staring at a mushed-up mass of fur and blood and bone that lay there and bled at me.
I looked up and saw that a horde of the creatures had crawled through the gap left by the now-missing river, clustering along its banks in the hundreds, framing the serpentine opening. Which no one had worried about as it was over an impossible, fifteen-story drop! Only it wasn’t impossible for most of the dozens now jumping down on top of us, who shook off the stunning fall and quickly got back to their feet.
Or back to their appendages, which might be a better phrase, as insect-like bodies were as prevalent as the hairy animal type. They were interspersed with more amoeba-type things and others with angles that confused the eyes and broke the brain because they didn’t belong in nature. At least not our nature.
And then a sixth sense had me throwing myself to the side as something hit the ground where I’d just been standing. And sprang at me for a split second before being sent rocketing back against the far wall by a blast from Enid, who was screaming hysterically and targeting everything in sight.
“Get to the water!” Pritkin yelled, grabbing my arm. Right before he was jerked away by something with wings and dragged into the air.
“Pritkin!” I screamed, watching as he formed his shields into a shiv as long as his arm and plunged it into the creature’s belly, gutting the thing mid-flight.
I saw them fall, started to run that way, and got cut off by a surge from a group of the now rapidly landing creatures. But Bodil had decided that she wasn’t going down without a fight and had hopped onto the highest rock surrounding the crevasse and raised her arms. And before I could wonder what she thought she was doing, a roar of water shot out of the fissure, what had to be thousands of gallons of it, formed itself into a wave and bitch-slapped the horde.
They tumbled backward, desperately struggling for purchase on the slick and now wet floor while an ocean crashed around them. It knocked them off their feet and into each other, and then into the side wall as if a freight train had run over them. And there they stayed, splayed against the rocks as the surf pounded, battered, and broke on all sides.
It was an impressive opening salvo and one they hadn’t expected. But it wouldn’t help us for long because we couldn’t escape through the same crevasse that Bodil was using to defend us. Leaving us trapped and waiting on the main force, and we wouldn’t be waiting long.
Damn it, we should have taken that swim! But we hadn’t, and no way could Bodil handle them all. But she knew this place like the back of her hand and might still have a chance—if she left us behind.
She could get to Rhea even if I couldn’t, and Rhea was smart. Maybe together, they could figure something out. And erase all this before it became the end of our story—and everyone else’s!
“Go!” I screamed at her over the roar of the water. “Get out of here!”
“Stop trying to be a hero,” she seethed, calling up two huge, watery fists from the flow like the golden one Pritkin had used on the Cetus.
They were as big as tanks and hit just as hard, using elongated river-like arms to knock the hell out of anything in the vicinity, even as torrents of high-pressure water spewed out all around them, sweeping away anything they’d missed. Combined, Bodil was laying waste, which was needed as the rest of the overhead squad had started hitting down, just an endless falling curtain of them.
One that was being lit up before they even made it to the floor, this time by Pritkin, who had fought his way back over here. I stared because he didn’t have that kind of power. He didn’t have any power!
But ?subrand did, and although he still looked pretty out of it, lying on the floor by Pritkin’s side, he was awake enough to cough up a cloud of energy just like Enid had on our chase. Only not just like. He had clasped Pritkin’s left leg with his right arm, and a wreath of sparkling silver-white light hazed the two limbs before climbing up Pritkin’s body. Where it was absorbed and came out of his extended right hand as a gigantic fire hose of flame.
It lit up the falling Horrors, turning some of them to ash in the air and causing them to flutter down like gray rain. It sent others to the ground still burning, giving me the surreal image of a curtain of living fire, writhing and screaming even as it fell before smacking down and sending sparks flying everywhere. Then Pritkin twisted around and sprayed more flames at the oncoming mass of creatures from the door, which had almost reached us.
Geysers of fire and water mixed and flowed, steam billowed and fought with blowing clouds of ash, and Pritkin yelled with a magically enhanced voice. “Go! We’ll hold them off!”
“That ‘we’ better not include me, white boy,” Alphonse growled, ducking under the fist-shaped tidal wave aimed at a flying creature swooping at him. And, when it went screeching into the void, he headed for the crevasse, where Enid was defending Bodil as she defended us.
But reaching her was harder than it appeared, as another of the creatures almost immediately fell onto him. It was one of the kaleidoscoping Horrors that kept changing form, or maybe my brain was just trying to figure it out and failing. All I could see were sharp edges and strange colors I didn’t have names for, but it must have had wings, as it and a handful of others had been circling overhead, looking for victims to pick off.
It jerked Alphonse off his feet and into the air, only to get a surprise when the big man tore free of those talons and then used them to somersault on top of it, despite leaving a lot of shoulder meat behind. And reminded me that he was the old-school kind of vamp who preferred jeans to a tux, didn’t know what all the forks were for, and didn’t have a sophisticated bone in his body. What he did have was a knack for putting a hurting on whatever was hurting him.
As he demonstrated by grabbing the thing at what might have been its middle and ripping .
Suddenly, it was a mass of green-tinged weirdness, which I supposed was caused by some kind of blood because it was spewing everywhere. Alphonse dropped ten feet back to the ground, and the creature fell on both sides of him into a puddle of its own ichor floating on the tide. And the circling things abruptly got more distant, screeching at each other in warning.
And watching as their fellow Horror kept morphing, squealing, fighting, and—finally—dying. Because, Ancient Horror or not, nothing survives being torn in two. At least, I hoped not, but I didn’t see what happened then because somebody grabbed me around the waist and started running for the crevasse.
It wasn’t Pritkin. He had set up a ring of fire around our small area, with the flames leaping five or more stories into the air, I guessed so that nothing could jump over them. But creatures could go through if they had bodies that could withstand the heat, like the one he was currently battling, which was nine feet in height with a hard, turtle-like shell, only what was inside wasn’t a cute Ninja.
What was inside was—
My brain skittered away in fear and revulsion as ?subrand carried me forward while still stumbling from sleep and what must have been a massive magic loss. I wanted to ask what he thought he was doing, but then my train of thought, such as it was, cut out because something was burning me—from inside my armor. Something small and bright enough that I could see it through the silver scales as if a hot coal had been shifted under my suit and was now torching the bottom of a breast.
What the—
And then I remembered something I should have thought about before now.
“Put me down!” I told ?subrand, who was hauling me bodily toward the fissure while waves crashed all around us courtesy of Bodil.
I think she was trying to clear us a path, but that’s a little difficult when you’re slinging around the equivalent of a raging river at the end of each arm. As a result, she was hitting us about as often as everything else. Waves slapped us, gushing into my mouth every time I tried to speak; the spray stung me like a thousand tiny needles on any part that wasn’t covered by dragonscale; and ?subrand said something that my translator primly refused to interpret in reply and struggled on.
“Wait,” I told him, gasping. “I have to—”
He didn’t wait.
“Listen to me!” I yelled. “We have to go back—”
“Shut up!” he screeched, with whatever had been left of his princely calm in tatters. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
“Because I’m trying to tell you—”
“Shut up, or I’ll make you shut up!” he might have said more, but something came flying at us, and he thrust out a pike that he’d picked up somewhere, allowing it to skewer itself on the point.
And halfway down the shaft because its momentum caused it to just keep going. He whipped the shaft around as it clawed at us and tried to bite with a long, deadly-looking beak, even though that caused it to impale itself further. And the hideous thing was too far along the thick wooden pole now to fling off, forcing him to throw the weapon and its shish-kebobed addition away, sending it flying into the waves, still shrieking.
“The demon is right,” he added without missing a beat. “You have to survive! You and Bodil can go back, can talk to them, make them understand—”
“Like I could have made you understand?” I yelled. And then we were caught in the wash of foam on the edge of another massive, watery fist, but I was ready when he stumbled free, gasping, dripping, and shaking his head. “No one will believe us when we return—if we do!” I said quickly. “Not without proof—”
“Then make them!”
“Are you listening? They don’t trust me! And they hate you! We can’t do this, but if you get me to Pritkin—”
But ?subrand could give a shit what I wanted, although he had finally stopped, but only because we’d reached the crevasse. It was now an upside-down waterfall shooting skyward to fuel Bodil’s fight, which suddenly wasn’t fist-shaped any longer. It was fey-shaped, as a mass of translucent manlikans sprung out of the crevasse in our faces, looking like seven-foot-tall crystal statues and leaving me staring at the carnage through their watery flesh.
Before they scattered in all directions, taking the fight to the creatures for a change.
And okay, maybe we had a chance!
Or not, I thought, as the Ancient Horrors tore through our new army like it wasn’t even there. ?subrand looked like he couldn’t believe that, either, as the fey constructs weren’t puny. One could have taken on a human platoon and had a pretty good shot, but not a platoon of these things.
But the manlikans were having an effect, if not the one that Bodil had probably hoped for. Some had trapped slashing appendages inside their watery forms, tightening the ward that encased them enough that the furious creatures could not get back out, no matter how hard they struggled. Others were piling on individual Horrors, six and eight at a time, sealing them off by the watery scrim of their bodies and effectively drowning them in mid-air. But most were breaking against the assault like the tide, exploding on all sides and seemingly useless—until you noticed that the enemy had come to a halt, giving us a brief reprieve.
Which Bodil and ?subrand intended to use to shove me into the crevasse whether I liked it or not. “Get ready,” she told him. “I have to release the spell to let you through. Take her to the portal and thence to Earth—”
“Like hell,” I said, thrashing. “They’ll kill you as soon as you let go!”
“What do you think is going to happen in any case?” she snapped.
“I . . . am not entirely sure that I know how to repair the portal, should it be required,” ?subrand told her. “We had servants for such things. . .”
“Then figure it out!”
“I will do my best,” he said before a watery hand reached out and jerked him up to her face, dragging me along for the ride.
“You. Will. Figure. It. Out!” she yelled. “I buy your chance with blood , princeling! We all do! And you,” she looked at me. “I hope you’re as evil as your mother. You’ll need every bit of it. Now go!”
We didn’t go. A zerg rush of creatures came at us from the side through one of the steadily widening gaps in the flames, just as the ones overhead swooped down in a combined attack, forcing Bodil to change course.
Instead of releasing all that water, she dropped us and reclaimed her watery fists, sending one to meet the flock mid-air. It slammed into them in a liquid firework that sent them flying in all directions, shedding feathers, fur, and other stuff I couldn’t name and sending ear-splitting shrieks echoing around the room. While swiping with the other hand at the force on the ground, throwing them into chaos once more.
?subrand abruptly released me and spun to take on something massive and prehistoric-looking, covered in armored plates like a Stegosaurus that God had cursed, that had somehow withstood the onslaught, and I took the only chance I’d likely have to reason with Bodil.
“I’m not leaving without Pritkin!” I told her. “And the rest of you!”
“Stupid child! Stop thinking about yourself!”
“I’m not!” I yelled back, more furious than I could remember. “Listen to me! I can’t do this without you!”
“And why not?” she sneered. “You’ve been managing so far—”
“Because I can’t use this!” I screamed and held up Radu’s ring, which had come alive in the pocket I’d stashed it in after Bodil started a flood of water magic spilling everywhere, to the point that it had been burning the crap out of me with just the overflow from its power. And was now sending a cascade of bright blue light everywhere that lit up the water with a shimmering, glowing, spectacular iridescence like nothing I’d ever seen.
It was beautiful, I thought, dazzled in spite of everything. It was beautiful! Like the bioluminescent waves on some beaches on Earth.
Only the creatures didn’t seem to agree.
Maybe because it was burning them, too. Every Horror that the light touched started screaming and, in some cases, writhing, smoking, and melting, with appendages sloughing off of the bones underneath like shed clothes. Only clothes didn’t bleed that much.
It was as if the tide rolling out from us was no longer water but acid, causing bloody pools in different shades to bloom everywhere. But I didn’t feel anything. I was getting hit with spray from all sides, but it was just cold, clear liquid, without even its former black color, now that it was outside of the caves.
Bodil grabbed me. “You wait until now to show me this?” she screamed and snatched it.
And I guessed she did know how to use it because a second later, the flow from below suddenly increased, like a Yellowstone geyser times ten. To the point that I was blasted backward, slipping and sliding and landing on my face. I picked up my head to avoid drowning in the madly frothing water and then just stayed there, staring.
The crevasse had become an enormous fountain, now gushing up three or four stories high and causing the flying things to wheel away, back toward the top of the cave and out of its acidic spray. And it was raining death on the demons down here while the surging waves flowed over any who stumbled as I had. But while all that had happened to me was that I’d ended up soaked again, when the water washed past them, it left only more bones behind to join the skeletons already there, with all traces of anything else eaten away.
I stared at the twisted remains of something a few yards off, the bones of which were sizzling despite all the water, and the realization hit hard. Pritkin was part demon, too! I looked around for him for a blank second and then scrambled back up, screaming his name even though I knew it was useless; he’d never hear me in this!
I’d forgotten that he’d linked our translators, something that the curses suddenly flooding my ears reminded me of. And then I spied him coming at a run through the maelstrom of acid-like rain whipping about us like a hurricane because Bodil was getting the hang of whatever the hell was in that ring. And he wasn’t burning.
He wasn’t burning!
Human blood for the win, I thought dizzily, as he grabbed me, bleeding from a dozen wounds but still on his feet. And tore me off of mine as the furious waters cut out like someone had twisted a spigot. I guessed Bodil had enough liquid to work with up here now. And the next moment, before I could even catch a breath, his momentum had us plunging into that dark, watery hole, which had once looked so forbidding, but now—
Was our only way out.