Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter
Forty-Nine
The hardest part of holding together ritual magic is maintaining a balance.
Most of magic as practiced by wizards comes from our humanity—our emotions, specifically.
But it has to be shaped and controlled with rigid intellect, with raw focus, concentration, directed intent, and will.
The state of balance between those two portions of the mind could feel like a lot of things and could be described in a lot of different ways.
But Mab had just seriously harshed my wizard mellow.
I felt the ritual magic begin to intensify, like a spinning wheel beginning to wobble, becoming more forceful and more unpredictable. Wild sparks exploded out from the anchor crystals around the circle in a myriad of colors, blindingly bright.
Lara let out a cry, shielding her eyes with one hand. “Harry?”
“Mab!” I shouted, my words emerging from my lips tortured and groaning, as though I was straining under a heavy weight. “What the hell are you doing?”
I saw her smile, far too wide, her eyes flickering through the color spectrum in mad glee. “Why, being kind, my Knight. As you requested.”
And she turned toward Justine, raising the knife over her head.
“Empty night,” Lara breathed.
And blurred toward Mab at approximately the speed of an arrow from a bow.
Mab was her match.
She seized one of Lara’s arms with her free hand without so much as looking, as if the Queen of Air and Darkness had seen this movie before and already knew exactly where Lara would be.
She spun and flung Lara across about a quarter of the summoning chamber, to send her tumbling along the outside of the rounded walls.
Lara spun over and over, front and back slamming against green crystal, and landed thirty feet later, stunned.
Then slowly Mab turned, and step by step, inch by inch, approached the bound Justine with that mad, too-wide smile.
I struggled to keep the ritual together, focusing my thoughts on what should be happening instead of what actually was. “Alfred!” I screamed.
And Demonreach, the genius loci of the island, rose from the crystal, ten feet of massive, cloaked, humanoid fury.
Eyes of green-gold lightning blazed deep within the hood.
The ground shook. Cracks appeared in the crystalline walls.
The cloak flared back, away from Mab as though a gale of invisible, intangible wind emanated from the Winter Queen.
The body beneath, which I had never before seen, was composed of stone and winding oak roots, of earthen muscle and sinews of green leaf and long grass.
“QUEEN OF WINTER,” boomed Demonreach’s voice from within the depths of the hood, “THOU SHALT CEASE THY ACTION.”
The spirit slammed a gnarled-root fist to the ground, cracks spreading through the crystal, and beneath Mab’s feet there was a sharp report, like a rifle, and more roots exploded up, winding around the ankles and calves of the Winter Queen, halting her in her tracks.
Mab threw back her head, let out a cackle that chilled the blood of even the Winter Knight, and turned her whirling-color mad eyes to me. “Oh, my Knight,” Mab tittered. “Didst thou actually think thou couldst draw a bigger gun than me?”
Then there was a sound like thunder, and a rift wide enough to drive a Volkswagen through tore open in the roof at the entrance to the summoning chamber, and a black-clad form streaked through the newly created opening, to land hard enough to send a series of spiderweb cracks spinning out through the crystalline floor between Demonreach and Mab.
It straightened slowly, a hunched, elderly, feminine figure that was nonetheless at least half a foot taller than me, shrouded in thick overlapping garments of tattered black.
Thick white hair was pulled back into a close braid.
She shrugged a shoulder and a heavy cleaver with a black handle hung heavily in her withered old hand.
She smiled.
Green light gleamed from iron teeth.
And in my Sight, I saw the edges of a hundred thousand tales of horror and dread.
People, even children, devoured whole, popped into soup, baked alive in ovens, chopped and minced into pies.
I saw the faces of countless folk gasping out their last breaths, freezing to death in the cold, lying helpless as they were devoured, still alive, by wolves and worse in the bleak and desolate places of the world.
I saw the merciless resolve of nature’s darkest face, the hideous and passionless power of the avalanche, the horrible absolutism of dark, cold water rising to drown everything upon the shore with entire and final equity.
I saw the wreckage of mortal remains upon countless battlefields, birds and insects and hungry things devouring the carrion.
The stench of dead and rotting flesh rose through my nostrils directly into my thoughts, meat writhing with maggots and worms, and presiding over all of it a constant, calm, precise presence that forced me to turn my eyes away before they saw something even worse.
“Spirit,” rasped Mother Winter. Her voice was the sound of dead leaves in the wind, of scale rasping upon scale, of insectile chitin skittering along bleaching bone. “Stand not between the Queens of Winter and their promises.”
I felt my jaw drop open.
Hell’s bells.
Mab’s boss.
The Crone Queen of the Winter Court, here in the mortal world.
It hadn’t happened for centuries.
Crystals of ice began to spread over and through the verdant stone of the summoning chamber, fracturing the green light into dozens and dozens of glacial shades.
The temperature plummeted from the steady fifty degrees underground to deep-freeze levels in seconds.
The ice spread to the roots wrapping around Mab’s calves, and with a gleeful kick of each leg, she shattered them like so much brittle frost—and continued toward the trapped Justine.
“Don’t!” I screamed.
Mab whirled toward me. “This is what thou didst ask for, my Knight!” she snarled. “To defy the doom of choices made! A doom that cannot be undone without further choice!” She pointed the knife at Thomas. “His,” she spat, and then the knife stabbed at me. “And thine!”
I stared in horror as she turned back toward the column of ice.
And my brother made the weakest, softest sound of pain.
I turned back to Thomas. He still lay where he had fallen, but his eyes were open and focused upon the tableau. Tears filled them. His face was twisted with pain. With exhaustion.
Hell’s bells. I knew those eyes.
I knew what was behind them.
I’d stared down at them in glasses of booze and my shaving mirror for months.
His head started to fall.
Mab’s spectral eyes settled on a shade of cold blue ice, and she turned toward Justine, raising Medea’s bodkin.
Hell’s bells.
I clenched my teeth, focused upon my physical body—and lifted my eyes to lock gazes with my brother’s demon.
The pale thing trapped in the circle felt my eyes and met them with willing hunger as it drank and drank from the steady current of power I’d been feeding into it.
And everything stopped. Mab froze in place in the act of raising her knife.
Mother Winter, her hand outstretched in a gesture of forbiddance at Demonreach, froze in place.
The genius loci’s cloak rustled to a stop where it stood.
Lara, pushing herself back toward her feet, locked into position, triceps flexed.
“Let’s talk,” I said quietly, from my energetic body’s lips.
Interesting, replied the Hunger. You make mouth noises and I hear the intent behind them.
“Yeah, I’m full of surprises,” I said. “We need to come to an understanding.”
The Hunger was as frozen as my physical form was, but its mirror eyes gleamed. I want to devour you. All. Everyone.
“Sure, I get that,” I said. “You got an empty you can’t fill. But tell me. Suppose you did that. You got to eat me and everyone else on this rock. Then what?”
Confusion entered its tone. What?
“Suppose you get everything you want,” I said. “You get to eat the whole damned world. You’re still going to be trying to fill that empty place. Only there’s going to be nothing left to put in there, is there?”
The Hunger dwelled on that for a moment. Ah, it said at last. Linear time. The feeding ends those lines.
“Right,” I said. “Exactly. And when it does, what is going to be left for a Hunger to nibble on? Forever and ever and ever?”
Its thin lips quivered, ever so slowly peeling back from pale teeth. That is the nature of the Empty Night.
“Sure,” I said. “But think about it. Wouldn’t you rather spend more linear time feeding?”
It seemed to dwell on that for a moment.
“Work with me,” I said. “Do it my way. And yeah, maybe you don’t get to gobble up everything all at once. But you get to keep feeding. And feeding. And feeding.”
Yes, came the hideous, hissing answer.
“Right, okay, follow along,” I said. “What happens if Thomas dies? You don’t get to eat then, either, do you?”
Again, the thing considered, as though it had encountered an entirely new thought it had to wrap its mind around. I could sense its attention shift to Thomas’s battered body.
My portal closes. I am consigned to the Outside once more.
“Not much to eat there, is there?” I noted.
There is emptiness. Hunger. The tone of the voice shrank. Nothing else.
“But you could stay here, yeah?” I took a breath and put gentle emphasis on the next words. “For as long as you can keep Thomas alive.”
It simply stared at me in silence. I had to hurry this along. I was getting tired. Feeding this thing was as different from satisfying Lara’s Hunger as feeding a finely bred racing greyhound and a friggin’ elephant.
I wish to continue feeding, came the answer from the thing, finally. To feed and feed and feed. For centuries and centuries of your time. The Empty Night will come. But I wish to take my pleasure of the mortal realms until then.