Chapter Forty
P ritkin had enough juice left for a bubble spell that snapped in place over my head right before we submerged and found ?subrand already down there. He was clutching a ball of moonlight and looking stunned and fairly pie-eyed from whatever had happened while I hadn’t been looking. But he was kicking with his legs like his life depended on it, although he was going in a circle in his panic.
Pritkin grabbed him when he came around again, which made swimming difficult, but what the hell wasn’t? I started trying to help, only to stop almost immediately and stare around. Because something was wrong.
“Disorientation spell,” Pritkin gasped while struggling with ?subrand, who was fighting him for some reason. “You have to—”
But I didn’t hear what I had to do. I suddenly couldn’t hear anything except my frantic heartbeat. And I realized that maybe ?subrand hadn’t been stunned by the fight after all.
Disorientation, my ass .
A wave of vertigo hit me so hard and fast that it stripped everything else away, and made the “oo” sound at the end of Pritkin’s last word elongate for what sounded like forever. My head started spinning to the point that I felt nauseous, my brain fritzed like a lightning bolt had just hit it, and when the gray static cleared, I was left with no idea where I was. The ball of light and the crevasse were still visible, but they suddenly didn’t make sense anymore; nothing did, including whatever Pritkin was yelling at me.
And then it got worse.
For a moment, I thought that the Horrors must have taken the plunge, too, because it felt like the various pieces of me were no longer attached. None of them drifted off with the tide as if something had slashed a path through me, but they also didn’t seem like they belonged to me anymore. I couldn’t feel my hands; my legs may as well have been someone else’s; and my head felt like it had blown up to three times the normal size and was drifting about like a detached balloon.
Someone grabbed me around the waist, and I couldn’t fight them, even assuming that I was supposed to. I didn’t know what was happening; I didn’t know anything! Except that it was getting darker.
Somebody grabbed my face and looked into my eyes, and I could barely see him, although he couldn’t have been more than a few inches away. I didn’t know who he was; the mixed-up features weren’t in the right place, and as I stared, an ear floated off to the other side of the head. But he was telling me that the spell had been formulated against demons, that he couldn’t break it, and that I needed to breathe.
And yes, yes, I did.
I could feel my chest getting tight despite having a bubble of air right there. But my lungs couldn’t recall what to do with it, assuming they were lungs anymore. And not whatever my fingers were becoming, which—agghhhh!
I flapped them in horror, but it didn’t help; if anything, it only made things worse. They noodled out in pale, too-skinny appendages, miles long, like thick spaghetti disappearing into the distance, which didn’t make sense! But nothing did. Including the face in front of me that was now melting like hot wax and making me want to scream, only I couldn’t remember how—
And then somebody else seized me, although not in the usual way. A hand felt like it reached into my chest and fisted, which would have been enough to send me spiraling the rest of the way into a nightmare, except it didn’t hurt. And this grip, I could feel!
It was solid and real as nothing else was, making me clutch it in panicked relief. As soon as I did so, a tiny bit of sensation returned, confused and randomly firing from different parts of my body. A toe spoke up to let me know it was still down there somewhere, a bruise throbbed menacingly in my side, and my vision started to clear, only I found myself looking at nothing as I was staring off into the inky void.
And then a voice echoed through my head. “You are a great deal of trouble,” Faerie said and pulled .
All of a sudden, I could see clearly again, although what I could see wasn’t down here. It was up there, where I guess she still was, and things hadn’t improved. Bodil was running out of juice, with the ring’s light starting to stutter around her; the enemy was regrouping on the sidelines, waiting her out; a circle of bodies where the fires had almost burned down surrounded the throne and was sending up noxious smoke everywhere, which her rain was no longer thick enough to disperse; and Alphonse—
What was he doing?
He had climbed on top of the giant eruption of a throne and was now peering into the darkness. And then yelling back down at us. “I don’t see her! I don’t see her!”
“Go,” Faerie told him, her voice echoing everywhere. “I have one more trick, and once it is done, it is done. You must be well away before then.”
I didn’t know what she meant and was too busy sucking in oxygen to care—until Alphonse did a perfect dive off the back of the big chair and into the crevasse, which I hoped would treat him better than it had me. And as soon as he was gone, all hell broke loose. But this time, it wasn’t their hell.
It was ours.
Faerie did have a trick, and it was a good one. I’d seen it once before when she helped to get me out of that horrible camp. Which was why, when every intimidating creature that she or one of her children had ever seen suddenly came roaring into the room, I barely even flinched.
The demons, however, looked around in terror and confusion, wondering what this fresh attack was, before spotting the force arrayed against them. They didn’t stop to wonder where they had all come from or how so many had managed to sneak up behind them. And in their shoes, I probably wouldn’t have, either.
Because they were facing an army of ten and twelve-foot-tall trolls, scarred and wearing old, greasy hides and carrying huge clubs; a contingent of ogres that framed them on both sides, armed with crossbows and, in some cases, old blunderbuss-style firearms they must have traded with the humans for once, and modified to be even bigger and more deadly; and an assorted company of dangers that ranged from several massive dragons, gleaming in scarlet and gold, to a swarm of pixies big enough to count as a storm.
The latter group also included an enormous Kraken, peering into the cavern through the missing doors, which didn’t look so big next to its enormity, and a group of merpeople, tridents in hand, even though there wasn’t near enough water to support them. But nobody was clear-headed enough to consider that when the most cacophonous battle cry ever screamed out of their collective throats, loud enough to shake the very stone around us, and they charged as one. All of Faerie’s vanished children coming home to defend her, one last time.
The ranks of the Horrors, so relatively ordered a moment ago, broke and ran. But since there was nowhere to go, they mostly ran into each other, sinking teeth or claws or whatever they had to work with into whoever was between them and safety. The room fell into utter pandemonium, to the point that the Horrors were too busy to notice that the horde descending on them wasn’t real.
But for a minute, it didn’t have to be, as they were doing a fine job ripping themselves apart.
“I have to send you back,” Faerie told me, snapping my stunned gaze back to her. “Your friends are getting as far from the Margygr’s spell as they can, and the further they go, the less it should grip you. Go quickly, and remember, you are my last hope. If you don’t reverse this, it will be cemented as my future—and Earth’s, too.”
I stared at her. “Wait. You’re not coming with us?”
“I cannot travel outside my realm. And even if I could, I do not have the strength. I spent too much magic holding on all these years and then helping you in the fight, and already feel myself starting to unravel.”
“You were helping?” I repeated, trying to catch up.
She laughed suddenly. “Yes, child, or you would all be dead ere this. But I can do nothing else. And it feels . . . strangely liberating . . . not to have to fight anymore. Or to see, as I have every day for fifty years, the piecemeal destruction of my world. Better for it to go all at once, in one great eruption, than to be taken like that!”
“A-all at once?” I repeated, hoping I didn’t understand.
But as usual, when it was bad news, I always got it right.
“When I go, my world does, too,” she confirmed. “You must be past the portal by then, or there is no saving you. Go—and let us hope that I chose my champion well.”
With no other warning, I found myself back under the waves. And saw Pritkin’s face emerging from the darkened flood, although it was wildly distorted and frankly terrible, and I wasn’t sure whether that was from the spell or the mess we were in. But probably the latter, as he was clutching me against him as he swam, and we were moving .
And Faerie was right. The more distance he put between us and that awful crevasse, the clearer things became. I could still barely move but could see straight, and the rest of my senses seemed to be sorting themselves out.
Enough to recognize that the little puddle of light we were shedding held me, ?subrand, Pritkin, and Alphonse, who was ripping through the water like a dark bullet before catching up to us. And that was it. Until Bodil dove down into the haze of moonlight under the crevasse, ceding the battlefield she could no longer hold and making my heart clench for her.
“Pritkin!” I gasped, getting his attention because he was facing the other way.
He looked back, and we paused to see if the other demigoddess in the group could handle the Margygyr’s spell better than I had. And yeah. Being half-fey instead of half-human made a difference, didn’t it?
Because instead of freaking out, getting disoriented, and forgetting how to breathe, Bodil shook her head as if to clear it a couple of times, spotted us, and started swimming our way. And unlike ?subrand had been doing, she swam straight. Even though the blue light haloing her from the ring was stuttering so badly now that it looked like she was being electrocuted.
But she didn’t appear to be harmed by it, and then I knew she wasn’t when she turned and sent a tide pushing out behind her big enough that I could feel its suction tugging on me, and I was not that close to the chasm anymore.
But, I suddenly realized, someone else was!
I grabbed for Pritkin’s shoulder and missed, but he got the idea. “Enid!” I yelled and saw him wince, as voice modulation seemed to be another thing I couldn’t control. But then he looked about and noticed the same thing I had.
The beautiful redhead was missing.
“Cassie—”
“I lost track in the fight!” I said, forcing my numb lips to form words. “She must still be back up there—”
“We can’t—”
“We have to! We can’t leave her!”
“Faerie is with her—”
“Faerie’s almost out of power and told me that when she goes, so does this place! We—”
“She told you what ?”
“She helped us in the fight,” I said, gasping because my lungs were still trying to play catch up. “And said we’d have died otherwise. I don’t know what she meant, but—”
“She was using something similar to the spell on the crevasse to disorient the enemy and make it harder for them to attack us.”
“ That was them disoriented?” I said, disbelieving.
“Go back to the stuff about what happens when she runs out of power,” Alphonse said, swimming closer. And for some reason, I could hear him as easily as Pritkin.
“I added him to our spell,” Pritkin said before I could ask. “Looped in his translator.”
“Who cares?” Alphonse demanded, glaring at me. “What do you mean, this place goes when she goes? Like the palace?”
“I think . . . the world?”
He stared at me.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask a lot of questions! But it sounded like this whole world dies with her. Like she’s vital for its survival, and it can’t continue without her.”
“Then what the hell are we doing here?” he yelled. “Let’s go!”
“We have to get Enid! Did anyone see her?”
“We’re not going back,” Bodil said, catching up to us. Unlike me, she seemed to be moving fine, and while her voice had a strange, underwater quality, it was perfectly understandable.
“We don’t have to,” Alphonse said. “Those things’ll be on our ass in a second as soon as that plug runs out! We need to go !”
“I did a water ward,” Bodil explained to the rest of us, which I guessed was what that last push had been. “But it won’t hold for long. Or at all if we rupture it from this side.”
“But Enid,” I said, looking around, hoping to spot that flame-red hair in the gloom. But there was nothing, not even any fish. The water was as empty as it was cold and deep, just an endless dark nothingness.
“I didn’t see her and I looked,” Alphonse told me. “I climbed that damned throne trying to spot her, but there was nothing. One of those things probably dragged her off.”
I stared at him, and he looked steadily back. As a vampire, Alphonse had lost many people through the centuries, including the one who meant the most to him. He’d had to learn how to let people go, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t!
“We have to go back!” I told him.
“No.” That was Bodil. “Nor can we stay here arguing about it.”
“You can’t—”
“I can.” It was implacable. “The ring’s power is guttering; it won’t last much longer. Decide if you want to save the world—both of them—or a single girl.”
“The world,” Pritkin said. “She just needs a moment. The disorientation hit her hard.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t have one,” Bodil said, catching me around the waist.
And the next thing I knew, we had left the others behind in a rush that would have made a speedboat proud.
“You—let me go!” I said, trying to fight her. But I could still barely move, and it did no more good than it had with ?subrand. The fey looked tall and willowy, like a good gust of air would blow them over, but it was a lie. They had the strength of high-tensile steel.
And this one was using it.
“No.”
“That’s my ring!”
“Yes, and I will thank you for it when we have time. Right this moment, we must swim—for our lives.”
And I guessed the others agreed because they caught up to us over the next few moments, with Alphonse carrying a still loopy-looking ?subrand on his back, Pritkin cutting through the water like a blond porpoise, and Bodil swimming as quickly as if she had an outboard motor attached, even when dragging me. And leaving a brave woman behind to face death alone in what was probably the most horrible manner possible.
Thank you for letting me fight.
I felt sick.
Bodil glanced at me, and something shifted in her expression—from an iron-jawed will to. . . I wasn’t sure, but she looked different suddenly. “You’re not like your mother,” she said.
“No. My mother would have found a way to save her.”
An elegant black eyebrow raised. “Your mother wouldn’t have tried,” she said and then twisted her neck around.
“What is it?” Pritkin said.
“They’re coming.”
And they were. Despite what Faerie had said, the Horrors could go underwater; they just didn’t like to. But it looked like we’d pissed them off enough to make an exception in our case because a boiling mass of hate was pouring through the chasm and headed this way.
I couldn’t see them except as a frothing wave and then not at all as the light ?subrand had conjured up winked out. But if he hoped it would hide us, I had bad news for him. The army chasing us came raging on, not needing light as some didn’t even have eyes, but the magic radiating off of Bodil’s ring drew them like blood in the water.
Which there would be soon enough if we didn’t do something!
“Take her and go,” she told Pritkin, thrusting me at him. “I’ll swim away, and they’ll follow me. Don’t use magic.”
“That’s not a problem,” he said grimly. “I barely have any left.”
“Then swim fast,” she advised, and the next moment, she was gone.
Or, rather, she tried. But once again, the best-laid plans came crashing down around our ears, although not for lack of effort on her part. She sent a tidal wave surging through the water behind us, disrupting the horde and causing them to scatter in every direction.
Which might have been enough to let us get away if not for one small problem.
There was another army in front of us.
They came from the palace, I thought, my stomach sinking. To make sure that we really did not have any way out. And they’d succeeded because we couldn’t fight them all.
In seconds, we were surrounded.