Chapter 18 Hollow City #2
Marina ripped free of its hold and threw her hand up.
Whorls of her divine power reached up into the sky, like ebony fingers locking around nature’s innate darkness.
She reared her elbow down. The Night bent to her command, condensing into a column of raven-colored might, and struck the creature’s frame in a windblown eruption, detonating the ground where it stood.
Its viscera scattered across the snow-strewn playground.
The weaponized umbra diluted back into a billowing cloud. It shrouded the light around them as it returned to the sky, fading the glacial landscape into an achromatic haze.
Soren appeared at her side as she straightened her arm. Her bone was visible through the mangled flesh. Slowly, the ashen plate fused back together.
Soren gripped her waist firmly and tore a large, plastic piece from her side in a swift pull.
She grunted as blood poured down her leg. Lethargy tugged at her fading vision. She blinked and forced her spine to straighten.
“You good?” Soren asked.
Marina’s eyes constricted around the contour of a body banding back together in the obfuscation of her Night. She waved her hand to thin the layer, watching as an arm, a foot, and pink, wormy intestines slithered across the ground and reformed the Herald.
It tilted its head up to the sky as it completed its grisly restoration, and a feral screech poured from its throat.
Marina and Soren winced. The noise lanced her ears in a debilitating shrill. A sharp throb jolted through her forehead. The ground beneath her feet shook. Electric lines above them snapped like fishing wire. Sparks popped and rained down luminous embers as the wooden poles toppled over.
Marina and Soren teleported out of the way.
The loud crash threw up a veil of soot and icy powder.
Red flashes of light broke through the plume of smoke and darkness. Mortal voices carried from the nearby streets, eager to investigate the destruction.
“Time’s up.” Soren wouldn’t risk getting caught. His identity as an assassin depended on it.
“Go!” she ordered.
Soren nodded once in affirmation and teleported away, leaving her alone with the Herald.
The crackle of the electricity jumping between broken poles lit the grayscale playground in purple and indigo. In the flashes of color, the eerie veil of the Herald twisted in uncanny angles, like an intrigued predator.
A shiver wracked her bones, exhilarated to be the focal point of such horror.
She couldn’t help but admire it, and part of her despised that feeling.
It’d taken her fear and rage years to manifest into a single nightrazer.
It took even longer for her to learn how to attune them to her desires.
Their abilities enhanced alongside her own, developing in tandem.
Acacius had five thousand years to hone his Olethros. He was able to mold his power into three different variants of his nightmares. They were extensions of him, just as her nightrazers were of her.
The Herald before her was a rare specimen she wanted to dissect. Perhaps she could play with it a little longer, get a better idea of what all it could do.
Marina solidified her stance and brought an arm up. Obsidian threads fabricated into a set of thin, smoky darts, levitating above her fingertips. She flicked her wrist and sent them flying through the air.
The Herald disappeared like a fading illusion.
It reemerged to her left.
She spun, manifesting a dark kris in her other palm, ready to carve into the monster’s chest.
A jagged, thorny spike tore up from the earth and ripped through the fiend’s flesh in a flash of crimson.
The Herald was thrown back from the impact into the brick exterior of the preschool. The structure crumbled around the creature.
The spiked, ruby briar twisted deeper into the base of its veiled throat, pinning it to the building. Its legs flailed, and a thick liquid that resembled crawling tar oozed from its chin and stained the frosted lawn.
The harsh stench of copper assaulted Marina’s nose.
Blood.
The glaring, red lights came into focus around the playground. Black SUVs surrounded the block.
Footfalls alarmed her from behind.
She whirled around.
A strong kick hit her calf and her knees buckled. Before she could regain her footing, a hand lurched her back by the shoulder. She landed harshly on the snow-covered ground. The air expunged from her lungs as a boot planted harshly across her ribcage, holding her down.
A man with ghostly white hair and a cloth mask hovered over her, the bottom half of his face obscured. The popping currents of electricity reflected like fireworks in the background. For a second, she thought Soren had returned, but she was gravely mistaken.
“Gotta say, just the sight of your face pisses me the fuck off.” The man propped his elbow up on his knee, narrowing his eyes in disgust. Silver hoops lined his earlobes.
He held his hand out to the side, and the snowflakes began metastasizing in the curl of his gloved fingers. They collected and formed into a transparent spike, its glinted end aiming down at her.
Not a man.
The winter god.
She recalled him from the time she and Solaris invaded the city for Naia. A middle deity and a leading member of the Blood Heretics.
“The upper half of your face doesn’t bring me much joy either,” Marina spat back, resisting the urge to plunge her heeled boot through his chest for laying a hand on her. “Is everyone too afraid to show their damn face these days?”
Another grotesque scream scraped out of the Herald’s maw. A viscous fountain of its rotted black blood splattered on the ground.
Theon snapped his head up.
Marina ground her molars, the horrid timbre of its last screech still polluting her mind.
Another barbed vine whipped past them like a hunter’s arrow and struck the monster straight where its mouth was, behind its shroud.
Marina’s heart pounded in her chest as she strained against Theon, an attempt to lift her head and find the origin of the briars.
Ronin approached them, hands stowed away in the pockets of his pants. The warning lights from the parked vehicles cast a cherry-red neon tint over his profile, an embellishment to his morbid power and its threat against her kind.
He came to a stop a few feet from the top of her head.
Marina’s pulse sprinted.
Ronin’s intensity sank through her skin like poison. His hatred for deities was palpable in the dark glint of his gaze as he regarded her. “It’s been a bit, Marina. Can’t say I’m thrilled to see you in my city, but here we are.”
A strike of annoyance bloomed in her.
He looked up at the destruction of the schoolyard and then over at the Herald tacked to the building. It no longer thrashed around in wild spasms. “Already took out my kid’s school too. Lovely.”
“It lingered in the alleyway, across the street,” Marina said.
Theon clamped his boot harder on her diaphragm.
She clenched the muscles in her abdomen, pushing against the tread.
Ronin looked down at her again. Pieces of his disheveled hair dropped in front of his face. “Yeah, seems we have a bit of a pest problem.”
She held his intimidating stare. “Seems you need assistance.”
Snow continued to drift in the biting wind. It collected in his hair and on the top of his oversized jacket.
After a beat, he exhaled, his breath accumulating like mist in front of his mouth. The bitter breeze whisked it away.
A detached expression set on his face as he shook the snow from his hair. “Get a crew to clean up this mess,” he ordered the winter god. “And for fuck’s sake, make it stop snowing.”
“Paralyze her,” Theon said as he flicked his chin down at Marina, “and I will drag her to a cell in the compound.”
Marina glowered at the middle god. “Let me assure you that if you drag me anywhere, you will never see light again.”
Theon twisted his head to her, his cerulean eyes thinning like icy daggers. “There’s no way in hell that you just walk out of here after the shit you pulled last time.”
He referred to her time with Solaris, when she forced him and Naia to wed in front of the burning brewery, between the mounds of their witch clan’s corpses. Not her finest moment, but if she could simply explain, Theon would understand the situation.
She pushed against his boot to sit up, and he kicked her back down.
“Theon.” Ronin’s voice held a twinge of impatience.
The middle god acknowledged him with an obedient glare.
Marina plopped her head back down on the dusted grass, willing herself to be good and not decapitate this nuisance. It wouldn’t be civilized. That, and he was right to doubt her after the destruction she’d hailed on their city.
“Play nice,” Ronin ordered, an amused smile pulling at his lips. He lifted his hand, facing his palm to the Herald, and his bloody briars disbanded and retracted back into his cut. “She’s on our side.”
Marina watched as the monster slowly dissolved into flakes and floated in the wind with the dancing snow.
Above them, a dark blue and gold-feathered bird circled in the clouds.
The winter god hung his head in a dramatic motion, firmly lifting his boot from Marina’s chest. “Of all the gods. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”