Chapter 17 #2
I thanked her as I kicked at the glyph, smearing my blood across the floor, erasing its power. The glow faded. That bought us some time. But how much?
The Hive Father pointed its talons forward and opened its hideous mass of mandibles. Something that sounded like both an animal scream and a chitter erupted from its mouth. The mutated cultists shrieked in answer. Call and response, master and servant. As one, the Hive cultists descended on us.
A shiver ran down my spine. This was the true finale to Williams’s ritual. First he’d spilled all that mundane blood to summon the Hive Father and its many minions. Now the blood of those who worked closely with magic would close the circle and complete the ceremony.
This wasn’t any ordinary ritual circle. This was a portal in the making.
Brigette scribbled frantically in her book, a long, final stroke triggering her spell.
Pages tore free of its spine, ripping again and again as a storm of razor-sharp paper smothered the cultists in a cloud of whirling white blades.
The cultists thrashed as they bled from their incisions, blinded and muzzled by seemingly sentient sheets of paper.
But the Hive Father remained unharmed, its carapace hardly even nicked by the assault. Its shoulders shook in a familiar, sickening rhythm, its mandibles clacking. It was laughing at us. It was mocking us.
Another chittering command from the Hive Father, and this time the cultists truly went feral, snarling and slavering as they clawed at us, human nails transformed into the same glistening talons as their master’s.
One cultist grappled Julian’s blade, unheeding of how it cut into her palms. Another slammed bodily into Elaine, knocking her off her feet, sending one of her spells blasting upward, dropping chunks of ceiling and dust. The Hive Father laughed again. It knew they were winning.
Brigette hurled the limp cover of her emptied book at the nearest cultist, crying out when he snapped his teeth and charged at her. Bradley braced against me, his head in his hands, his lips quivering. A spell? Was he preparing an incantation?
The Hive were closing in. I clenched my fist, then clenched my teeth against the searing pain of my arm. Frustration clotted my throat. I was supposed to protect him. I was supposed to make sure that we—that all of us—made it through this.
“Bradley,” I muttered. “Run.”
“No,” he growled back. His voice—was it deeper? More guttural?
And then he spoke again.
“Kill your progenitor,” Bradley said, pointing at the Hive Father. “Rend. Tear. Devour.”
The blood lust seemed to fade from the cultists, their frenzy suddenly forgotten. Glimpses of human thought returned to their eyes, but only for a flicker. As one, their heads turned toward the Hive Father, heeding Bradley’s commands.
“Kill. Obey. Destroy. Obey. Feast.”
The Hive Father stumbled backward as a dozen growling cultists fell upon it.
The ground trembled as it crashed against the floor, its carapace sounding like steel on cement.
But even that couldn’t stand up to the combined fury of its usurped servants, their anger mounting into a berserk frenzy with each of Bradley’s orders.
Its carapace couldn’t stand up to the Hive-imbued strength of a dozen frenzied cultists as they forcibly pried away every piece of its armor, revealing soft, trembling white flesh.
The cultists feasted. The Hive Father shrieked in pain as its children ripped it apart, limb from limb, only falling silent when enough of it had been devoured, when the thing that had once been JA Williams finally, truly died.
Bradley’s words trailed off, the harsh staccato of his commands only ending now that the Hive Father had met its own end. He swayed to his side, fought to stand upright again. When his eyes rolled into the back of his head, I thrust my arms out to catch him.
As Bradley fainted, so did every last cultist. I went to my knees, laying him gently across my lap.
Within moments, the cultists lost their insectoid features, becoming human again.
Most of them would survive. Whether their human organs could survive several helpings of Hive Father flesh remained to be seen.
Metal clattered as Julian’s sword slipped from his hand, too tired to grip his beloved blade, much less fight.
Brigette stared at the remains of the Hive Father in open horror.
Every glance she snuck at Bradley’s sleeping face showed glimmers of awe, perhaps fear.
Elaine gazed at her brother in quiet curiosity.
All along, he’d been made to feel like the odd, non-magical member of his family, when in fact he’d had this strange link to the Hive.
All along—was it more than just a field of study, an obsession?
I looked down at him, relieved at least to see that his features were more relaxed, his chest rising and falling under my hand with each labored breath.
He needed to rest now. So maybe Bradley Brooks was a man who could wrest control of the Hive and their alien minds, an insect whisperer, his own special kind of monster.
At least he was my monster.