Chapter 17
GRIFFIN
The door was unlocked. Ajar, too. Of course it was. Williams was expecting us. Worse, he was daring us to find him. I knew in my gut that we were walking into a trap, but what choice did we really have? The Hive Father was here. JA Williams needed to be stopped.
I nudged the door open with my foot. I would have preferred to bust it down with my brass knuckles, but no sense expending energy when it was better saved for the upcoming fight.
Because of course there was going to be a fight.
Of course there was going to be some villainous monologue where we’d have to sit through Williams talking through that rancid pucker he called a mouth.
A bullet. He’d put a bullet in Bradley’s chest. My fingers curled, my hand tightening into a fist as I imagined punching that mouth over and over again.
What little we could see in the house was illumined only by moonlight, streaming in through the open door, spilling through tall windows and sliding glass doors.
I winced at the sight of the captain’s wheel on the wall, the driftwood furniture, the ancient anchor that was probably meant to tie the whole room together.
What I wouldn’t give to smash all his dubious decor to pieces.
“It’s dark in here,” Julian muttered. “Too dark.”
Elaine whispered something in a low voice, then flicked her wrist forward. A globe of light launched from her fingers, but even that didn’t help much.
“Best I can do,” she said. “This darkness—it isn’t natural. Something here is suppressing all the light. Swallowing it.”
Three guesses what that was.
We passed one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I glanced at the ocean, the waves black in the dark of night.
A chill ran down my spine when I thought back to everything Bradley had said about the Hive.
They would rush over our reality like a flood, like water, crash against the earth like waves.
I clenched my fists harder and strode forward.
“It’s the Hive Father’s influence,” Bradley said. “Patches of supernatural darkness—it helps them hunt. It helps keep their prey frightened.”
Brigette held her arms out, calling for a halt. “There. The room at the far end. Do you hear it?”
Chanting. Several voices, in fact, repeating words in a language I couldn’t hope to understand. Maybe Bradley knew, the way his ears strained to listen. And then I smelled it, the metallic tang of something awful and familiar.
“Sacrifices,” I said. “They’ve spilled more blood. That’s where the ritual is taking place.”
We rushed forward as a single unit to one of many doors around the foyer, Julian’s blade drawn, Brigette with a book in one hand and a pen. I breathed deeply, reorienting my arcane energies into my fist, into the ancient brass.
Elaine pressed her wrists together, palms held out, and barked a single word. A burst of mystic radiance blasted the door off its hinges. Good. No time for subtlety now.
But the chanting didn’t stop, and now the smell of gore was almost overpowering.
A large room with a sunken pit—it resembled a living room, that retro style that, at one point, might have had all the couches in a square at the center.
I couldn’t imagine Williams ever relaxing or lounging with his family.
It was hard not to think of him as a monster.
And true enough, all the furniture had been cleared out, the pit surrounded by the Hive’s devotees.
I’d expected hooded robes and wicked daggers, but these were just people.
Something about the way they were dressed, though, the smartly fitted shirts and trousers, the effortlessly elegant dresses.
They were part of Williams’s inner circle, as if the wealthy and powerful of Moraira City didn’t yet have enough.
Slumped on the ground were unmoving bodies, all arranged in a circle, their torsos etched in blood red with those awful, familiar glyphs.
Standing in the center was JA Williams himself, arms upraised, his lips still dedicated to an ongoing recitation.
Blood bathed his hands and arms up to the elbows, stopping just short of the sleeves of his linen polo, gore soaking the hem of his bleached trousers. Our eyes locked. He smirked.
And then I realized why everyone was dressed so nice. This was an event to these people. These bastards had enjoyed a dinner out on the terrace, sipped champagne as they watched the waves and the sunset, all as a prelude to this ritual. These sick fucks. These utter monsters.
Williams never broke his chant. He nodded at our group, his hands making the subtlest of movements, turning slightly at the wrist.
Four of the cultists closest to the door began to convulse, mouths falling open in agony, then tearing as their jaws unhinged. Bone cracked as Williams’s dark magic embedded Hive essence in their bodies, their eyes bulging, their minds gone feral. No. Their minds gone completely.
All four fell upon us. Another bolt of magic from Elaine’s hand went streaking through the room, the Hive’s movements so rapid and erratic that it threw off her aim. Julian slashed out with his sword, drawing blood. I screamed, fist upturned as I dove into the fray.
The chanting had abruptly ceased, the remaining cultists realizing their ultimate purpose.
Only Williams’s voice remained. He’d reached the final stage of his ritual and no longer had need of them.
The still-human cultists ran for the exits.
At least two lunged for the circle, a desperate bid to stop Williams from turning them, too.
But it was too late. Laughing, he thrust his arms up, fingers pointed to the sky. Every last unpossessed cultist in the room stumbled and screamed, bones breaking, bodies quaking from the agony of their unholy transformations.
Great. Just great. A snap of his fingers and Williams had instantly bolstered his forces. Typical rich guy, always getting what they want. The cultists swarmed the room, forming a mass between the business ends of our weapons and JA Williams’s face.
But they all bled and broke just fine. Every smash of my knuckles collided against Hive-human flesh with a crack and a flash.
The windows shook with every blow, the cannon’s magic explosive enough to make the cultists consider whether getting up again was the right move.
The ones who were still conscious, that is.
And amid all the chaos, blood and fists and blades flying, somehow none of us had noticed that the chanting had ended.
Even Williams had gone silent. Maybe it was easy to miss in the din of all the inhuman screams the cultists emitted as they attacked, their wails as we struck them down and knocked them out of their insectoid fury.
Then Williams’s bones began to crack. He threw his head back, a blood-curdling scream ripping out of his body, his mouth opened wide as if to make space for the agony.
Even his servants froze in place, watching as their master howled into the night.
And then his mouth just kept on opening.
And opening. Skin ripped. His jaw popped from its hinges. He was transforming, too.
“No!” Brigette cried. “No, no, no. He wasn’t summoning the Hive Father.”
Bradley finished her thought with a hoarse whisper. “He is the Hive Father.”
When Williams opened his eyes again, they were beetle black, the compound faceted eyes of an enormous insect. Slick black blades erupted through his skin, his fingers turned into wicked talons, the bones of his forearms corrupted and curved into pincers.
All human flesh fell away, revealing the thing that had just stepped into our world, the thing that had used JA Williams as both its host and its doorway.
There was no mistaking the locust-like origins of the Hive within the creature, its spiny, chitinous exoskeleton a glossy black painted over with the dark red of blood.
It unfurled to its full height, eight feet of carapace and hatred, its horned head uncomfortably close to brushing against the ceiling.
“So no villainous monologue, then?” I asked.
“Very funny, Gallows,” Julian snarled. “This is bad. Real bad.”
“For you, maybe,” I teased.
The Hive Father’s carapace was as good as armor, better than anything that hack Kane Smith could forge. Julian’s blade would have a tough time cutting through to its soft, vulnerable flesh. But my knuckles? Cannons were made for blasting, baby. Its magic could take down a tank.
I raised my fist, pushing all of my energies into the loop of ancient brass, teeth clenched as I aimed a strike straight for the creature’s segmented thorax.
Eldritch power roared as my knuckles struck home—but nothing.
The Hive Father’s acrid breath misted against my face.
It backhanded me with its spiny talons, smashing me out of the way as easily as a man swats an insect.
The blow sent me sprawling across the floor, my muscles and bones aching from the crashing fall. Bradley and Brigette rushed to my side, helping me to my feet as Julian and Elaine peppered the monstrous creature with blade strikes and magical blasts.
I cried out at the shooting pain in my arm. The skin had been torn open, an angry red gash left by the Hive Father’s talons.
“Griffin,” Brigette said, her voice trembling. “Your blood.”
I looked down, then wished I hadn’t. Trickles of blood from the ugly wound in my arm had fallen to the floor. The droplets were glowing an eerie, ominous crimson. And had my blood really dribbled that way, forming the exact shape of an occult glyph?
“This was all part of his plan,” Bradley said through gritted teeth. “We’re supposed to be the sacrifice.”
With a scribble and a whispered spell, Brigette commanded pages to rip free from her book. I watched as they arranged themselves into the approximation of a bandage, just enough to cover my wound, thick enough to absorb my blood and stop it from drawing more of these hideous runes.