Chapter 52
It’s raining stone and concrete.
I can’t hear or see around the slabs that land all around us, and the cracking of the earth that sounds from all the way down south. The walls shake with the force of it, beginning to crumble. The Chasm is open.
Sophia doesn’t wait. With a cry she lunges for Caspar and is tackled to the ground by his Brood. Peter takes off after her, sword tipped in a clinging frost none of us can escape. It coats the ceiling, the floors. The catacombs have become a frozen, quaking tundra.
Those crimson scales, the color of dried blood, crawl up Reid’s hands and neck as he dives into the fray, tossing Brood demons from Peter and Sophia. I’m not shocked to find him fighting for our side. Reid despises deviants. He always has. And in this moment, I am grateful for his self-hatred.
Claws slice, arrows fly, blood spurts, my mother is still screaming—
“Get her out of here,” Deacon commands an already-shifted Ward, motioning toward my mother. “Find Baz.”
“Go with him,” I tell my mom, even as her fingers knot in my clothes to take me with her.
In her eyes, I’m handing her off to a monster.
My gaze finds Ward’s. He gives me one stoic nod, snout flaring with fury.
I don’t have to tell him to save Penny. I can see by the way his eyes keep drifting up that she’s all he’s thinking of.
Ward barrels through the herd of Brood for one of the tunnels out, my mother in tow.
“After him!” Caspar growls, his voice reverberating and inhuman.
Finn and other Brood hurtle after Ward, but I’m there faster.
Deacon too. I see only a moving target. A painted bull’s-eye for me to drive my blades into, right in the center of Finn’s meaty greaser skull.
I launch at him, allowing my aeon nature to guide me.
I was made to do this, I tell myself, daggers slashing. It’s a gift.
I land two hits—his side, his shoulder—and Finn barks in pain. It only fuels me. More, my gift tells me. More.
But Finn isn’t alone. His men attack, protecting their fragile prince’s hide. Finn cackles as I dodge and weave, claws and teeth baring down.
“I’ll drink your soul like wine, huntress,” he says with sick glee. “I’ll lick your wounds like—”
Deacon throws a clawed punch through Finn’s manic face. Spit flies. Teeth too.
The Brood swarm him and I choke on my screams as Deacon’s taken down. Until, seconds later, there’s a soft glow in the darkness. An aura, illuminating the blood and dismemberment.
Deacon rises, two dead Brood demons in each pale, gnarled claw.
A glorious, punishing demon god of death.
His body bigger, more lethal than it was a minute ago.
His arms and neck covered in those alabaster scales.
And sprouting from his head—two gleaming, moon-white antlers.
The White Stag, coated in blood. Child of High Thane and harpy.
Cernunnos, Buck of the North, Lord of Wild Things.
And tonight, I am one such animal.
I’m practically foaming at the mouth for the kill when I leap onto Finn.
He’s not expecting me to pummel him, fist after fist flying into his pointed jaw until it’s misshapen.
I dodge his retaliatory swings and keep delivering hit after hit like I was taught by my father.
For Peter. For his mom. For the innocents I watched Finn slay in my dreams. Finn’s unconscious when I drive my silver into his chest. But something pulls me back, yanking me by the straps of my ruined ball gown. I miss his heart by a single inch.
“We need to go,” Reid pants.
I shove myself free of his grasp. “Get your hands off me.”
“The Windsor’s on Main Avenue,” Reid growls. “It’s old, Viv. The shock waves from the Chasm opening are going to cause the building to collapse.” And we’re down in its bowels. Not good—
“Then we need to be faster. Need that ring back…” The only way to close the Chasm.
“You can’t beat him!”
“I am not leaving them all to die.”
Reid’s face is as grave as it’s ever been. “This is one fight you have to run from, Viv. Nobody wants the Chasm closed more than me, but—”
He doesn’t get to finish the words. Or maybe he does, but I’m not there to hear them.
I’m dragged backward and thrown hard into the body of the deceased ogre. Despite the pus and odor that cling to me, I heave with gratitude as I choke down air. If I’d landed against the stone, the blow would have cracked open my skull.
Caspar leers over me, his humanoid face with his blunt horns and serpent’s eyes far more frightening than the shadowed hood he wore when I saw him last. My entire body slumps with the blow. I’ve broken a rib, I think. I move to slide my dagger under his chin and find it bent at an odd angle.
“For Beatrice, I would have let you live,” Caspar concedes in a voice that slips below my skin and runs its teeth over my bones.
“But then you kill my son?” His eyes are that of a savage as he lifts a claw to my throat, his other holding me down by my broken insides, despite how I squirm and thrash.
“Your mother and I will have to mourn our losses together.”
I’m out of options. Even as my aeon senses hum. Even as I long to mangle and slice. I can’t see—can’t breathe—past the terror and the pain and the desperation—
I don’t want to die—
Caspar brings his claw down to slash through my neck—
When Deacon tackles him off of me with a savage roar. Deacon—antlers glowing, mighty and destructive and ferocious. They go tumbling over the ogre and into the wall.
Heart in my lungs, breath coming like a freight train, I move as quickly as I can for them.
To use my one remaining dagger to end this monstrosity, this nightmare.
Not a single Brood gets a hand on me. I am as swift as the frost that splits from Caspar’s being.
Deacon and the High Thane land blow after blow, flashes of ice and antlers and blood in the paltry light. I’m inches away, inches, dagger raised—
When the gutting sound of Deacon’s agony rips my heart in two.
Caspar has already kicked him into a wall when I reach Deacon’s side. His blood is pooling on the floor. Clove fills my nose. Stones fall from the ceiling.
“No, no, no—” My hands press against the gash that spans from his ribs to his throat. It’s bigger than both of my palms. His dress shirt is all that holds in his organs. Caspar’s claws have pierced his heart. A death sentence.
“Get out of here, Vivienne,” he rasps. He tries to move and groans with the pain. His antlers cast his broken face in a macabre glow. “The place is going to collapse.”
My heart is straining. My pulse has stopped. This can’t be happening. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Go.” His eyes are dimming. “Before I beg you to stay.”
A tear slides down my cheek and onto his chin. “You wouldn’t have to beg.”
“Please.” His voice is hoarse. “He’ll kill you. Don’t make me watch that.”
I pitch forward, the sobs breaking from me, and lay my head on his chest as the fight wages on around us. Screams and blades and ash and limbs. Rocks crumbling, walls collapsing. Deacon’s comforting scent is gone. All I can smell is blood and dirt and my own salty tears.
Muffled above my head, Deacon takes in a shuddering inhale. I can hear the fluid rattle in his lugs. His hand is shaking as it rests softly on my head. “I missed”—a hacking cough—“I missed your shampoo.”
“You hate it,” I laugh through my tears.
“No,” he rasps. “I never did.”
I’m wracked with an all-too-familiar grief. The loss of someone I can’t endure life without. A horrible reckoning: I don’t want to be here without him.
A crash bleeds into a moan of agony and I snap up, whirling to make sure nobody has come to finish him off. I am rabid. Sobbing, panting. I will die right here, splayed across his broken body.
But it’s just the fight around us growing dirtier, nastier. A demon pummels Peter. Sophia’s ripped into by a shiny, prowling werepanther. Reid fights to reach us through a deathly, savage Brood. His own mutinous warlock long dead.
I scan for the High Thane and find him across the desecrated chamber, surrounded by his men, at the exit of the tunnels, an enraged look on his face.
His icy power scatters across the ceiling as he closes off every other way out.
His membranous wings snap out with his fury as he flees, trapping us in here behind him before the ceiling collapses.
Deacon’s dying breaths are a rattle. “Vivienne…”
I cannot breathe—
Don’t go. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me here without you.
“Shit,” Sophia chokes, hand to her leg where the were she’s killed got his claws in her. “Oh god, Deacon.”
If I focus I can just barely hear the Windsor above us. Walls creaking, wood snapping and bending…The harrowing screams. Hundreds of people, terrified, fleeing—
The Chasm is open. Deviants of all kinds, slinking out. The destruction, unimaginable.
“Go,” Deacon instructs, his voice fading. “Get into that hallway before Caspar seals you in here.”
“Viv,” Sophia says, tears flowing. “The ceiling is going to collapse. He isn’t—” She cries, all bravado gone. “He isn’t going to make it, but you still can.”
My eyes burn. I hold Deacon’s jaw in my hand. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Vivienne—”
Someone, Peter maybe, tries gently to pull me up, and I thrash and snarl. “No!”
Deacon’s eyes are wet. Resolute. Then they glow white. “Do it now.”
Suddenly, it’s only silence that roars in my ears.
I am nothing but a vessel. I stand, dropping his bloodied hand. I walk from his side into the passage Caspar left from, blocked off with ice. I step across the threshold serenely. All is well.
Then I come to.
“What the fuck was that?” Sophia pants. Peter is helping her limp into the passageway. Her leg is oozing blood. I can see bone beneath her dress. “You just walked out of there like you were in a trance.”
“I don’t—I don’t know…”