38. Chapter 38 #2
“Or maybe javelins nowadays.” He had me in his arms in a second, his forearm across my throat and my back against his chest. “No matter. Fire eats wood even better than steel.”
And then suddenly we were surrounded.
I’m not sure where they came from. The orchard, maybe.
All I knew was suddenly they were there, slightly transparent but growing sharper every moment, flowing out onto the sprawl of grass.
They wore white dresses, white tunics, and the air around them bent and glittered vaguely.
Pale-faced children with wide, unblinking eyes, boys and girls in a range of sizes. Eight in all, their faces eerily still.
And in their hands, the axes.
“Finn,” Remy said with my tongue, “get the fuck out of here!”
The axe blades shone gold beneath the sun and the glow shattering off of Finn.
Behind them, the crowd was a stampede of noise.
Luceric stood straight and proud on the stage, wings extended, his face shining like a jewel in the distance.
A beam of sunlight streamed off the tip of another javelin he held at his side.
The flames around us swirled in the wind. The tree branches above us rustled madly, sending a tumble of apples to the grass. In each child’s eyes I found a strange, starry glint that sent my stomach into a freefall.
I did not have much time to wonder about that before a wave of flame, erupting from Finn’s outstretched palm, rushed toward the children, who, as one, raised their own hands.
The flames crashed improbably against solid, inexorable air, as if the children had harnessed the strength of the winds to fend them off.
“Valic!” Finn shouted.
I felt a bolt of ice in my limbs as Remy made me struggle against his brother, which was pointless.
Finn’s arm was unyielding as iron. As a few more ripe apples toppled to the ground, I looked up in time to see silver streaks arcing through the air above my head, heard the telltale thuds as they met their marks.
“We have to leave!” Remy yelled, ramming my head back into Finn’s collarbone.
“Too late now,” Finn shot back. “He knows we’re here, he’s sent his lackeys. When will we have another chance?”
“They were never children,” I gasped, mostly to myself, but the crackle of flames and the clash of steel drowned my voice.
A good disguise to don. Children were known for their lack of social graces, their unabashed stares—they had not been staring at Valic for his height, his dark skin, but because they had known what he was all along.
Some of them fell; I could see it through the flicker of the fires, small pathetic silhouettes crumpling to the grass to the horrified cries of the human crowd.
And then the flames came rushing back toward Finn and I with the force of a hurricane.
In the split second I had to brace myself for the burn, the flames vanished, curling into smoke.
Then the axes came hurtling through the air.
The ground disappeared beneath my feet for a stomach-wobbling moment before Finn blinked us into the center of the field, behind the angels wearing the skins of children, the shattered little bodies impaled with Valic’s blades.
The earth looked like a slaughterhouse floor, wet with blood that shone like satiny puddles of melted gold. My head swam.
Remy spewed out a rainbow of colorful curses that rang inside my head. “Finn, this is fucked, he must have known we were here the whole time—”
Up ahead, Valic plunged to the grass, dropping like a stone from the tree, loosening more blades from his chest as Finn caught the children unawares from behind.
Another blast of flame etched around their bodies and sent their hair dancing with embers.
The blonde girl I had noticed in the market whirled around to stare at Finn, her hair like milkweed, spidery and fine, alive with fire.
The axe she threw our way jolted through the air like lightning at the same time a knife burst through her open mouth and drove her to her knees.
The axe shimmered as it dropped to the grass and evaporated, as though it had died the moment its wielder did.
Still Remy was fighting Finn, as if he wished me to run. But where could he send me?
Valic was popping in and out of view all over the place, wrenching heads on tiny shoulders, his blades rising and falling, opening throats, until two children appeared at his sides in twin gilt mists, axes poised and gleaming.
Finn sent a volley of flame to swallow all three of them completely.
I let out a gasp, but when the flames burnt out, only Valic was left standing.
A gaping wound glowed and steamed on his side.
He was smoking at his edges but mercifully alive, and blinked ten feet away to deal with the last child standing.
Black ash and embers were all that remained of the ones who had grabbed him.
I heard the screams of the crowd, bright and loud, and could not even imagine what they were thinking. To their eyes, they were witnessing the butchery of children. It had all happened so quickly, in a minute or even less.
Wind around us gusted back and forth, and though the flames shivered in the draft, they didn’t expire beneath the beat of what I knew were heavy wings.
When Finn whipped around to look upon my savior, we found another javelin hurtling our way.
Finn blinked us back almost lazily, incinerating the weapon with a flick of his hand just before it sunk into the earth.
Luceric landed in front of us lighter than I’d thought possible for a being of his size, and my fear and awe warred with the anger I felt roiling in my head.
Remy wanted to rip Luceric apart nerve by nerve, paint the grass with his blood, throw a bolt through his body and impale him against the church he had raised in his own fucking honor—
The feathers of Luceric’s wings ruffled in the breeze. His long white robes rippled around his feet, where a slender golden band gleamed above one of his ankles.
Nothing could have prepared me to hear him speak.
It sounded like a perverse sort of glory, like unspeakable radiance, a flame in the dark, like everything good and horrible in the entire world refined and condensed into a single, unearthly voice.
It left every hair on my body bristling and had me trembling against Finn.
“Unhand her. Release her from your thrall.”
They all sound that way. I felt Remy’s hatred boiling up my throat. It’s by design. You were made to cow to them.
“No.” It sounded as though Finn were smiling. “I think I’ll keep this one.”
I felt my heart might burst with Remy’s loathing when my streaming eyes found Luceric’s carved face, though I had little time to fully appreciate the brilliant gold skin, the flowing dark curls and crystal blue eyes, before something fell from midair, landing piggybacked upon Luceric’s shoulders.
A flash of steel, a spray of gold. The angel roared and threw Valic off, but not before a Hell-forged blade had opened a gash along the side of Luceric’s throat.
I knew another jolt of double fear, mine and Remy’s, when Valic hit the ground beside us.
It was too hard a thump, too big a quake, but he leapt to his feet in an instant, the earth cratered where he’d fallen.
Whip-fast, another javelin streaked past, plunging into Valic’s shoulder to a spurt of blackish red blood.
It knocked him off his feet again, but I never saw him hit the ground.
A fountain of flame burst from Finn’s lifted hand, so dazzling I had to slit my eyes against it.
Wing ablaze, Luceric let out a howl of pain that rattled my teeth.
Another flash of flame from my left seemed to hit a wall of solid air, as if Luceric had, like the children before him, yoked the winds to push back against it.
“Is this wise, boys?” he asked. “If it’s war you’re after, war you’ll get.”
“He may be an angel, but he’s only a scribe who’s never been in a fair fight,” Finn said, his lips against my ear. “He’s not a warrior and I’ve been wielding fire all my life. He can’t hold off the flames for long.”
He couldn’t; they were creeping closer even as he tried to duck out from beneath them. His wing was crumbling into a drift of snowy ash.
“Are you all right?” Finn called, when a dark shape vaulted up beside us.
A ragged wound shone with light on Valic’s shoulder. Blood gushed from it, hot and tarry, but he hardly seemed to notice. His eyes were trained on something I couldn’t make out as the ground quaked beneath my feet. “Incoming.”
A white flood was making its way toward us from the church. The humans, coming for a closer look? They ought to have run screaming in the opposite direction, back to their pretty little houses.
He’s calling them, Remy said. He’s calling on them to help him, he must know the rule about killing living humans, that it’ll make us hesitate—“Finn, hurry up, watch your flames, they’ll be on us soon,” he added aloud. “The last thing we need is a pile of barbequed humans.”
Luceric had noticed the demonic lilt in my voice. “You’re helping demons, child?” he asked through a grimace, as if in mourning for my soul. He reached through the flames to loosen another javelin from his quiver. “It never ends well for servants of the dark.”
Three quick flashes of silver as Valic’s blades hissed past my shoulder. Each found their mark in quick succession, one two three, landing in Luceric’s thigh and gut and chest before he could elude them.
The air glittered with embers. Flames gorged on feathers, tendrils of fire inching closer to Luceric’s left wing folded behind his shoulder.
He ripped the blades from his body, bright blisters of gold blood opening on his white robes, and hurled one back at Valic, who dodged in time, but when he stood, a thread of blood had opened on his ear.
Before Luceric could take aim at me, a rope of fire coiled like a snake around his wrist and brought him to his knees. The fury in his eyes transfixed me.