Chapter Thirty-Six Clash of the Titans
Chapter Thirty-Six
Clash of the Titans
The lion was the first to fall. He threw himself at a stone giant, claws extended, mouth open wide in a roar.
The giant batted him aside like a child’s ball, with a sickening crunch of breaking bone when the granite hand slammed into his body.
I couldn’t see where the lion fell, whether on the bridge or over the edge.
I didn’t know whether he was dead or merely injured.
Either way, it boded poorly for the rest of us.
Harry skidded to a halt when a tree limb swung in front of her, rendering herself plainly visible for a bare moment as she stopped to reverse direction.
But another writhing bough barred her way from behind, too, and a third to the side.
Soon they formed a net surrounding her, drawing her ever closer to the gaping wooden maw beneath the tree’s green glowing eyes.
A whip-thin branch wrapped itself around her leg and yanked it off.
Harry was no longer a vibrating blur, just a one-legged woman struggling to escape from a deadly trap.
Arrow after arrow thudded into the tree trunk. They had no more effect than fleabites.
The air stilled as the howling wind ceased. I wondered what was happening to Kit, and Max, and the others. In only seconds, the tide of the battle had turned against us.
A slablike foot kicked Gervase’s horse out from under him.
He went tumbling to the ground. Jack slashed at the stone giant’s leg but only dulled her blade.
A ball of fire from overhead engulfed the giant as the dragon flashed past. A bolt of lightning followed, along with a deafening crack of thunder.
They burned off the lichen mottling the giant’s shoulders but achieved nothing else.
Jack swung her sword again and again, trying her best to keep the creature away from the king as he rose unsteadily to his feet.
She did not see the branches stretching nearer until one pierced her shoulder like a spear.
Sam bellowed with rage at the sight of his sister sliding from her mount, dark blood soaking her tunic.
He charged the stone giant and slammed his shoulder into its ankle.
A fissure broke open in the monster’s leg, exposing paler rock beneath.
A second blow knocked the giant off the bridge.
A branch thicker than a pillar swung at Sam’s head.
He ducked beneath it. Another thrust at his chest, and he clapped his arms around it, stopping it cold.
His muscles strained as he fought the might of the tree.
With a deep, resounding snap, the branch broke off. Amber sap dripped from the stump as it withdrew.
I hurried toward him, wanting to help but unsure how.
Not even Clem’s arrows were flying anymore.
The dragon was nowhere to be seen. Sam had become the last line of defense.
The only one standing in front of the ordinary soldiers, who had no more hope of victory against these creatures than they would have had against an avalanche.
They closed in around him. He put up a valiant fight, smashing bark and sending more of the giants toppling.
But then he tripped over a slithering branch. Before he could recover his footing, a stone fist cracked into his temple. He did not drop so much as fly backward, hurled in an ungraceful arch. He thudded to the ground almost at my feet.
I jolted to a halt. Blood oozed down the side of his face. It formed little rivulets that flowed off his cheek in a waterfall of slow, constant drips. His chest rose and fell raggedly, but his eyes didn’t open, and he didn’t stand up.
A second concussion, received before the effects of the first fully subside, can have severe consequences.
The words fluttered across my brain, as emotionless and dry as a footnote in a medical text.
Swelling of the brain is sometimes seen even in young, healthy patients.
This can lead to vomiting, seizures, and cardiac arrest… .
Something red and scalding pulsed at the base of my skull, sending jarring shocks into my spine. Thundering stone feet and grasping tree limbs reached for me, but I heard nothing besides a shrill, clanging noise whose source I couldn’t name.
I screamed.
Rock became crazed with cracks. Trees shuddered and twisted, showers of bark scattering across the castle walls.
I kept screaming, unable to stop even if I’d wanted to. The stone giants shattered, collapsing into heaps of gravel. The trees split and burst, toppling over with great splashes that threw water all the way up onto the bridge.
I screamed and screamed as gravel became pebbles and as pebbles became powder. I didn’t need True Love’s First Kiss anymore. Maybe I never had.
Maybe I just needed to be sufficiently motivated.
Sharp talons raked across my shoulders. I gasped in shock and then fell silent.
The clanging noise vanished. I nearly fell over. My body felt heavy, my limbs no longer responding as they should. The magic had drained out of me like water from a sieve. It had taken almost every last reserve of strength I had along with it.
I coughed in the dust that was all that remained of the stone giants. It filled the air in a thick mist, obscuring everything more than a few feet distant into smeary shadows.
A large, dark bird landed in front of me. Its legs and wings lengthened and thickened; its beak shrank and curved. Feathers transformed into hair and smoothed themselves into a gown.
“I’m impressed,” Angelique said. “Truly, I am. I suppose that’s the benefit of a rigorous magical education.”
“What did you do to me?” I rasped.
“Interrupted your spell. Remember? I warned you.”
I did my best to draw myself up straight. “You were too late. You’ve lost.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Have I? Who’s left to defeat me? You can barely stand after that display.”
“And what about you?” I asked. She was swaying on her feet. For all her bravado, if she’d been tired before, now she was on the point of collapse. “You’ve been pouring out spells the whole day. How’s your head feeling?”
“I was faking the headaches.”
I snorted. “No, you weren’t. You’re in agony.” Her face was pinched, her eyes narrow with pain. She’d fooled me about many things, but I knew what someone looked like when their head hurt so badly they could barely see.
“It doesn’t matter. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.” She held her hand out to me, palm up. She shook her arm, and a tiny creature with far too many legs skittered out from her sleeve and clung to her finger. “I’m not convinced you do anymore.”
I wasn’t confident I had the strength left to grow my hair a single inch.
But surely someone remained with the power to oppose her.
Where were my sisters and their spouses?
I had to have stopped Angelique’s creatures in enough time to save them.
I must have. And she couldn’t have killed every last one of the hunters. Could she?
Sam lay at my feet in mute contradiction to my hopes.
If the swelling causes the brain to herniate, then death is the most likely outcome, usually within minutes.
It was possible that as we spoke, his brain was squeezing itself out through the opening in his occipital bone, where the spinal cord enters the skull.
The tiny monster in Angelique’s hand looked at me with dark, liquid eyes as she brought it closer.
In the swirling dust behind her, a shadow moved.
“I’m rather proud of this one,” she said. “Scorpion mated with a blue-ringed octopus.”
I carefully didn’t look at the figure making its way toward us. I kept my eyes on the little abomination.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“First the sting causes paralysis, then it dissolves your internal organs. Very tricky to get it right. It took hundreds of tries.”
“I think I could outrun you.” I wasn’t sure of that. My feet felt as heavy as blocks of lead.
Angelique shrugged. “Go ahead.”
I didn’t move. Whether or not I was capable of running, I had no way to carry Sam with me. There was still a chance he would live.
“Or you can stay and let it bite you, if you’d rather,” she said. “It’s a pity, really. You taught me so much. I honestly thought that you and I had something—”
She gasped. Her expression became one of perplexity, as if she had been presented with a riddle she couldn’t quite solve.
She glanced down at the steel blade protruding from her chest. When she opened her mouth to say something, blood came out, first in a dribble and then in a flood.
Angelique dropped to her knees, slid off the sword, and fell over sideways.
“Stop trying to kill my boyfriend,” the hunter behind her said.
Jack dropped her sword, and it clattered to the ground. Her tunic was so drenched with her own blood it looked red rather than green. After a bleary, unfocused look in my direction, she collapsed on top of Angelique.
Angelique remained motionless, not so much as an eyelash fluttering.
Stabbing had been her weakness after all.