Chapter XXIX
XXIX
Arachni are so named for their resemblance to the common spider, though they have six legs instead of eight.
Their limbs are thin and muscular, making them adept at jumping large distances, and quick, fierce fighters.
Their weakness is the chasm mouth, as the soft palate provides direct access to the brain.
Any weapon that destroys brain function will be lethal to the arachni.
Maybe it was a trial run, Xan considered as he watched a spidery shape dart along a rooftop.
The arachni resembled a skeleton pulled in six different directions—a pale head at the center of its body with spiny legs twitching out from the middle.
Each taloned leg pulled the body along independent of the others and gave the creature a jumpy, disjointed appearance.
It sank into a squat atop the pointed roof.
Then it leaped into the air and landed on the nearby lawn, crushing the Orcan that Sarah Garza was fighting.
She shouted a sound of disgust and thrust a surge of fire toward the spider’s face.
She missed and hit one of the creature’s legs.
It lurched backward, its injured leg curling toward its center.
The creature’s face split from forehead to chin as its mouth peeled open in a shriek.
Sarah stood her ground and screamed back at it.
Xan threw the stake this time. The point lodged in the creature’s open mouth, killing it instantly.
“That one was mine!” Sarah cried as Xan ran up beside her.
He tugged the spear from the creature’s skull, bracing his foot against one of its legs.
“There’s another one behind you.”
“Thanks!” she shouted over her shoulder as she drew a short sword from the ether and moved toward another arachni crawling toward her in the darkness.
She buried her shoulder in the arachni’s body like a linebacker and impaled it as they both fell.
Sarah tended to favor aggressive offense when fighting, more a raging bull than anything cautious enough to take note of its surroundings.
Xan had tried to train this impulse out of her for years, but Sarah couldn’t shake her instincts.
The strategy brought her some success against Orcans with less mass, but one of these days it was going to get her in trouble.
As Sarah clambered to her feet, a wraith swept down on her from the sky, and she screeched.
She jabbed her blade upward and growled in frustration when the wraith remained undeterred.
It grabbed her from behind and lifted until Sarah’s feet left the ground.
While she dangled in its hold, its claws reached under her arms toward a strip of stomach left exposed with her arms raised.
Wraiths, like many Orcans, preferred to eviscerate their prey.
Xan ran toward Sarah as a jet of flame flew toward her from the right. Sarah crumpled to the ground as the wraith caught fire.
May Lin appeared with both hands encased in flame, emanating a threatening glow through the darkness. She knelt at Sarah’s side, and the flames disappeared. May reached for Sarah’s face, and Xan twisted away to lodge the stake in an approaching arachni’s mouth.
When he looked back, the two witches were embracing, locked at the lips like there weren’t a dozen Orcans on either side of them.
With an angry grunt, Xan cast a spear toward an Orcan at Sarah’s back. The two women pulled apart with befuddled expressions on their faces.
“Eyes on the fucking monsters!” Xan yelled. “Idiots,” he added under his breath.
Sarah looked at him with a stupid smile, happy as a pig in shit. She leaped to the side to bury a knife in another spider’s face, while May shot a streak of fire toward a pair of wraiths hovering overhead.
Xan was tempted to follow after them, break them apart so they wouldn’t get themselves or anyone else killed, when a creaking roar split the night.
His eyes shot to the sound, and Xan watched as Max used his magic to wrench a dilapidated auto body shop out of the ground.
With a subtle shift of his cane, Max threw the building across the square.
It roared through the air like a rocket and landed on a huddle of Orcans with an explosive crash.
The ground shook, and Xan bent his knees to steady himself.
Dead Orcans lay scattered at the heart of the fighting.
The Sentinels mowed through the beasts as they descended.
A winged creature dove toward the crowd and was incinerated by a jet of baelfyr before it came within striking distance of the Sentinels.
The few Orcans capable of summoning fire of their own shot fits and spurts of it back at the advancing witches, but they were outnumbered.
Another horrible grinding, and Xan turned to watch Max pick up what looked like a post office and launch it at an approaching cloud of flying Orcans.
It was a bloodbath.
Mann could not possibly have expected the Order to be overcome by a few hundred or so Orcans.
The scale might be unprecedented, but defending against this—the onslaught—was as much the mission of the Order as any of their duties.
They were prepared for Orcan war, had been since long before Mann himself was an Elder.
Mann knew their ways, knew their training, he should have known they could handle this.
He should have known they would mobilize to neutralize the threat before it spread.
Even with diminished numbers, the Sentinels could have taken on twice this many Orcans without suffering serious casualties.
Xan skewered two arachni as he tried to understand what Mann was planning.
Until it hit him.
Mann hadn’t chosen this place because there was anything special about it.
He hadn’t unleashed an army of Orcans to destroy a town for its own sake.
There was no hidden message in his choice of location or scenery.
Mann wanted the Order to come. He wanted them all to come.
He wanted the Sentinels to do what he knew they had trained to do—contain the Orcans before they could move anywhere more populated.
That was the point.
The Orcans weren’t here for any reason having to do with this place or these people. They were a distraction. Mann wanted the Sentinels in one place. Mann wanted the Sentinels away from the castle.
It was a trap.
Of course it was.
It was a trap the Order was destined to fall into. The possibility of an Orcan horde sweeping through the Order’s territory would never go unanswered. Mann had predicted their behavior exactly—they sent everyone to the front. All available manpower went toward eradicating the threat.
Xan forced his way forward. He needed to get to Max. Mann must have been drawing them away from his true target.
He thought of the castle, nearly empty as the Sentinels pulled out and the recruits were sent to safety.
Anyone with a position integral to the Order was sent to the safe house in the event that the Sentinels all left at once.
Who remained in the castle? Servants, a skeleton crew, maybe a Mage or two unwilling to uproot their work.
A human woman with curly black hair.
The bottom of Xan’s stomach dropped.
Had she left when the others did? What were the odds she was still in the castle?
Xan swore. She should have fled when he told her to. She should have left the castle the night she arrived.
It made no strategic sense that Mann would want anything to do with Vic.
Xan never would have predicted Mann would single her out the way he had.
The possibility that Mann wanted her, that he wanted to draw her away from the Order while they were distracted, rattled Xan.
But even if she wasn’t part of Mann’s plan, even if her presence was an accident, she wasn’t safe near the castle if Mann meant to target it.
Xan had to get back. He had to find her.
Shooting another pulse of fire at a descending wraith, Xan pushed his way through the horde toward Max.
Orcans tangled with the Sentinels on the ground, and weapons flew on a makeshift battlefield lit by scattered fires.
He felt it then, as he did whenever witches gathered, the crush of magic on all sides.
Chaos filled the air, choked him, pressed against his windpipe and begged to be used.
The energy that made them fractious and unpredictable in civilized company only helped the Order on the battlefield.
It made them stronger, wilder. It ripped them out of their heads in a way Xan could never train.
He tamped down the desire to lash out as he fought his way toward Max, at the center.
“I have to get back,” he said as he sidled up beside Max. “I think Mann wants us here. I’m worried he’s planning something to do with the castle.”
“A trap?” Max asked without taking his eyes from a pair of Orcans in front of him.
The fighting hardly ruffled Max, though a faint spattering of Orcan blood dotted his otherwise pristine overcoat.
He held his cane at shoulder height, and the Orcans on the ground circled around him, wary of getting too close.
Orcans were attracted to magic, to the power of it.
The Order had long suspected that witches made tastier meals than humans.
As a result, many Orcans, particularly summoned Orcans unfamiliar with the ways of the Earthen world, were drawn toward those beings most likely to kill them.
Yet even Orcans knew to steer clear of Max.
They hovered at his periphery, and he struck out at them.
“Don’t you think?” Xan grunted as he gripped another wraith with a shadowed hand and squeezed until it stopped moving.
“Take some of the squads with you. You’ll need to clear the castle.”
“They’re too slow. I can get there faster on my own.”
Max sent a jet of baelfyr at an approaching wraith. “I’ll send a warning to evacuate,” he said. “And I’ll be there as soon as I secure the situation here.”
Xan grabbed Max by the shoulder as a thought, hidden in the back of his mind throughout the months they’d prepared for such an attack, bubbled to the surface. He hadn’t dared broach the subject before.
“Don’t let the other Elders kill the survivors,” he told Max in a low voice. “Find another way to keep them quiet.”
Max caught his eye and nodded. “I will, Alexandros. Now hurry.”
It was hundreds of miles to the castle, where Xan would walk into an unknown situation.
He had no idea what might await him, and if he moved as quickly as he could, he would expend most of his energy just getting there.
It was unlike him to fly into a situation he didn’t understand and wasn’t prepared for.
But tonight he had to. It was a trap he walked into willingly.
Just as the Order could never turn its back on the Orcan horde, there was never any chance of Xan staying here.
He would never leave Vic to fend for herself.
With the release of a tightly held muscle, like a sigh at the end of a long day, Xan shifted into shadow and bolted.