Chapter 59 Never Missed
Never Missed
A poisoned dagger sank hilt-deep into crusted stone, cracks cringe-radiating in every direction, and Liv surged upright—or tried to; her arms wouldn’t quite work and the cuff on her left ankle hurt atrociously, something smeared on cold blackened metal eating at her skin.
The Ignatius-thing, dragged backward, clawed for her with empty hands. Liv stared at it, that warm, soft, invisible force filling her again. The metal clasping on her ankle chimed, then shattered, sending jagged slivers flying; Ignatius howled, still scrabbling.
But she had him now, and the force roared through her, amplified by dark, disciplined whirlpools at the far end of the giant cavern.
Monster-noises bounced against the ceiling, shivered the stalactites into free air, and smacked the stone walls.
Mental noise from the city overhead turned jagged and discordant as nightmares filtered into dreaming heads, slipping for a brief moment over the border into reality—and faded, snow blowing through tattered reflections.
Ignatius let out a single wrecked, massive sound, more a train-siren than a scream.
The thing inside him, stung, retreated like oil slipping down a drain, leaving behind only a choked gurgle.
Black cracks veined through the Father; he was a statue made of ancient discolored porcelain, his boots drumming as he was held, spitted, upon a pair of knives.
The hair-thin crevices became streamlets, the streamlets rivers, and a rag of rotting bone and zombie-putrid flesh still kept trying to force itself onto the altar and toward Liv.
The noise, both physical and mental, was overwhelming.
Gunfire boomed, and that meant the Sons had found her.
Liv jerked her knees up, ignoring a flare of red pain from her abused ankle, and as the dead, rotting thing slid from Erik’s blades her heart gave a giant singing leap.
She didn’t care about being smack-dab in the middle of a pitched battle, didn’t care that her ankle was bleeding and her hair full of crap from the altar’s crusted surface, didn’t care that she was trembling-weak as a kitten and her neck ached after the jolting, jouncing ride down here.
Erik stood with his chin slightly tucked, gazing down at the wreck man he probably loved, corpse turning into a twitching mass of rot. Erik’s face was healing in fast-forward, but just as she was about to slide off the altar and fling herself at him, he swayed.
The thing behind him had blue eyes, a wide wound of a mouth locked in a rictus, and it held a long, frail-looking, stained ivory spear with glittering red gems dripping from its gold-chained haft.
It had stabbed him right through the heart, and as Erik folded down, going to one knee with a jolt Liv felt in her own legs, it leered and lifted the dripping spear, staring right at her.
No. Everything inside Liv stilled, came to a single hot point.
No, you son of a bitch. You can’t have him.
The blue-eyed thing pitched forward; the next item on its agenda was clearly to stab her. She sensed its weight shift, dropping slightly before a lunge, and the point of brilliance inside her expanded, sensing amplifiers close—but not close enough.
This fight was hers alone.
You cannot have him, she thought again, and flung both hands out like playing dodgeball back in high school. In those days they’d played with basketballs, and the teachers turned a blind eye so long as the kids didn’t smack each other in the face too often.
Teenage Liv was certain they were trying to teach how to get away with cruelty; adult Liv, if she thought about it at all, pretty much assumed it was to prepare kids for an uncaring world.
Now, Liv realized that in all those years, she’d never missed a single throw.
This time she didn’t, either. The thing with its spear went flying, trailing a long scarf of thin black blood hanging in the air as it was torn into pieces like it had swallowed one hell of a lit firecracker.
Liv tumbled off the altar and landed in a clattering, fly-buzzing pile of bones at its foot. A giant retch wrung at her middle—the rotting smell was even worse, if that were possible—and made it to hands and knees, then halfway upright just in time to catch Erik as he collapsed.
Or she tried to. He crashed into her, not even trying to soften the fall, and that was a very bad sign.
A bubble of bright red burst on his dry, chapped lips; they rolled down the stairs in a confusion of arms, legs, and whatever rancid dried guck was smear-crusted on edges biting Liv’s bruised arms and shaking legs.
When they reached the bottom she squirmed frantically, untangling herself as death and combat bayed all around them, finally getting her arm under his big, broad, dumb shoulders.
“Don’t leave,” she whispered. “Don’t leave, Erik. Hold on. Oh please God, hold on.”
She wasn’t even aware of speaking, and the explosion of force had drained her. A trickle of warm power was returning, but slowly. The bottom of her barrel was well and truly scraped, as Mika would say.
Still, Erik curled into her with a heavy, weary sigh. Liv cradled the muscle-heavy, deadweight bulk of the only sanity she had left in all this cluttered rot and chaos; she kept willing, hoping, pleading for him to hold on, hold on, hold on.