Host

Chapter 21

L ouder, Eli shouted, “What? No ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? Just drop me ten feet into a slime pit and take off? What’s the matter with you, you big ugly feathered fiend! You trying to kill us?”

“That’s a cherub, you young pup,” another voice said, creaky and strained. “We just got picked up and dumped in the church. Shut your yapper or it’ll blow us to electrons.”

For a moment, I couldn’t place the voice, but I remembered Ernest Waldroup, the senior elder from Atlanta.

“Tears of Taharial, that hurts,” Thadd swore. “I broke a freaking wing.”

“What is this, old home week?” Rupert asked. “Audric?”

“Here. What happened?”

“Patience, brothers,” Shamus said. “When we rushed inside the sigil to take Thorn from the seraph, the wheels descended. And they took us up.”

“Like Elijah,” Jasper said, awe in his voice. “‘Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire,’” he said, quoting from the second book of Kings, “‘and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.’”

“We didn’t go very far for this to be heaven,” Rupert said.

“And if this is heaven, we got to talk to the cleaning crew,” Eli said. “Room fresheners, a little dusting, and a good vacuuming would do wonders.”

I couldn’t help my smile. I think if I were dying, Eli could make me smile. Come to think of it…I set the death thoughts aside. “How many of you are there?” I asked, my voice scratchy.

“Thorn?” Eli asked.

“Yeah.”

“Hot damn,” he said, fervently. “Where are you? You sound like crap. Are you hurt?” Limping, holding my side, I rounded the rubble and saw them in the scan, their bodies bright in the night, smoldering energies that had texture and smell. Joy danced at the edges of the scan, a synesthesia similar to mage-heat that I hadn’t noticed before.

Eli and Lucas stood near Thadd, who held one wing close to his body, the other half-furled. The two Waldroup brothers, Jasper, Rupert, and Audric were in a loose circle, weapons drawn. Five of my six champards, three elders of the kirk. They all looked worn to the bone, faces smeared with grime, body odors rank. They were beat. I could smell exhaustion on them, and old blood, and the reek of death.

I stopped as another spear of agony stabbed me. I touched my side where the spur had pierced. The worst of the broken ribs were just above it, and the pain of the two wounds seemed to mingle and consolidate, becoming more than the sum of the two. I was really hurt.

“Thorn? What’s wrong?” There was worry in Eli’s voice, and it warmed me.

I pulled off a healing amulet and two pain-relieving ones, thumbing them on and sliding them into a dobok pocket over the wounds. “Broken ribs.”

“How bad—”

“Later,” I interrupted. “Did you smell a reek when you landed? Something awful?” Eli nodded. “That smell is succubus larvae, and the queen is here.”

I saw their auras spark with sharp colors, and heard the steel-on-steel scritch of more blades being drawn. Afraid they would kill one another by accident, I pulled three illumination amulets, thumbed them on, and tossed them in a circle around the men. I should have done it sooner, but I was wasn’t thinking clearly. And the Flames had burned out my human vision, which was only now returning. The level of pain in my chest subsided marginally as the amulets went to work, and I managed a single breath. I handed another healing amulet to Thadd, who held it against his wing as Audric fashioned a crude splint.

“That’s what those things are on the walls,” I continued. “There are overlapping conjures here. I have no idea how many or what kind. But as long as the smell is contained, and no seraphs land, we should be okay.” A tickle started in the back of my throat, a dangerous cough that would hurt. I breathed shallowly, hoping to stifle it. “How long was I gone?” I asked.

“Too damn long,” Eli said, touching my shoulder as if to reassure himself I was alive.

“Forty-eight hours,” Audric said over his shoulder, reporting as he bound Thadd’s wing. “The seraphs watched as the town was attacked. We defended ourselves, but we lost many. The Special Forces were decimated in the first twelve hours, as if the spawn knew the greatest threat and targeted them specially. But the children and elderly are still safe behind your shield.”

Lucas stepped close, smelling of blood, crusted and old, but his sweat was sweet with the scent of manna. He reached out and touched my face, stroking my scars, wordless. I felt his relief. He had thought I was dead. I touched a crusted place on his hand. He shrugged my concern away.

Thadd sat down on a pile of rubble, rocking, holding his wing. One hand turned the seraph ring he wore on a chain around his neck. His plumage was caked with dried blood. It wasn’t his. A human had died in his arms.

To the side, I saw a shift of movement in the scan. Cheran was glamoured and hiding. I was surprised, as he was supposed to be in jail. I didn’t believe in luck or coincidence anymore; ergo, several things: someone important wanted him free, his liberator didn’t have to be one of the guys on my side, and Cheran wanted to remain hidden. He didn’t know about the blended scan, didn’t know I could see him. I decided to keep his presence quiet, but the scan wasn’t helping my light-headedness, so I dropped the skim and felt marginally better.

The Flames again blinked into sight overhead and spiraled back down. They passed through the shield with spits of energy, to circle behind me, saving my vision but holding back. Which I didn’t like at all.

A light illuminated the old church and the Ravens touched down in a back-to-back triangle, swords drawn. Their mouths opened and it was clear they were shouting, though there was no sound. And they didn’t see us. Interesting.

“Speak of the devil,” Eli muttered, hate in his tone.

Up close, I could tell these were crack troops, holy beings who lived to fight. They furled their wings tight, as if they intended to stay. The Ravens searched the night with glowing eyes.

Seraphs with swords. A succubus queen. Larvae. Not good at all. We were one heartbeat from judgment and death, a second heartbeat away from forcing the seraphs into heat. I had seen that happen when a seraph came upon a succubus. It hadn’t been pretty.

I shouted to the Ravens. They didn’t look my way. I stepped toward them and smacked into the shield, a barrier that brought me up short, a hot electric charge sizzling up my arm. This shield was a lot stronger than the one the queen was behind.

Azazel was luring seraphs here. The wheels had brought my champards—Amethyst in a rage, helping the Dragon, or the wheels bringing me assistance? And it sent them through the shield. I had a feeling that was unusual, even for a wheel. Whatever forces were working, it was Rupert’s dream. I needed my longsword, its prime amulet, and the femur bone.

Overhead, I caught sight of three more seraphs spiraling down, Zadkiel, Raziel, and Cheriour. But the wheels were nowhere in sight. Glamoured? Gone?

My threatening cough was growing more insistent, my breath harder to catch. I feared I had punctured a lung and it was filling with blood. But I had a battle to fight. I could die later.

To the Flames, I composed a formal request, saying, “Omega mage, I have been called. Omega mage, so be it. Yet, I ask, not demand. I beg, not command. Will you help this battle?”

“Yourssss to command,” they said, the words like the explosion of gases, the hum of electricity, and the ringing of heavy brass.

“The queen is protected by a conjure. Kill it,” I said. “Protect the other mage.”

“We cannot break the ssshhhield,” one said.

Despair filled me as they spun slowly away in a snaking line to hover over the queen’s shield. I followed them. The queen was crouched beside a pile of broken stones and brick on the cracked, burned floor. Rose was stretched out at her feet. I was in no condition to fight the succubus one-on-one. I wasn’t in condition to fight off a preschooler armed with a toy club. I reached out and touched the shield. It shocked me to my toes and I eased back.

On impulse, I stabbed into the shield with the Flame-blessed tanto. The blade slid in with a grinding sound like metal on stones. Deep purple-black embers sparkled around the insertion point. I shoved down on the blade, but it didn’t give. And now the tanto was stuck. Seraph stones. I couldn’t do anything right. I braced a foot on the shield, ignoring the electric shocks through my boot and the agony of my chest, and pulled. Slowly, with a sound like rocks in a tumbler, the blade slid free, leaving a thin slice. The stink of succubus wafted out.

I considered the small hole, and touched a throwing knife blade to the tanto. The touch created a tiny spark, like a minuscule sun, startling me, bringing a smile to my face. With a flick of my wrist, I threw the knife at the queen. So fast I couldn’t follow, the knife pierced the shield with a spit of sound, fine cracks shattering through the protective conjure at the impact point, centered around an elongated hole, like glass hit by a bullet. “Yes,” I yelled, exultant.

Beyond, the blade quivered in the succubus’s lower abdomen. Its scream filtered through the two holes. Eli threw a fist in the air. “You did it!” Sometimes flying by the seat of my pants paid off.

The queen screeched, bouncing away from my twin, beating around the wound in pain. It was a horrid vision, the human-looking woman beating herself, a knife sticking from her. Black blood trickled out around the blade. I hardened myself to the image as a tiny blaze of hope ignited in my chest. If the Dragon stayed gone we might…

If. I knew better than to think Murphy’s Law would keep its ugly paws off. Yet, the Flames formed into two arrows. Both shot forward, through the small holes, hitting the succubus at the wound site and disappearing inside. Eli cheered again and the other champards gathered close, Lucas at my back. Within the shield, Rose looked around, as if trying to find the source of the screeching. Her head bobbed on her neck like a bloom on a broken stem, drunken, and she seemed to fall asleep before she ever found me beyond the shield. She lay on the floor of the church as Jane danced around her, kicking her once in her pain.

I had to figure out how to get me through the shield. I touched another blade to the tanto, this time prepared for the spark, squinting my eyes. I threw it. Off balance from the pain of my ribs, my aim not sure, it sliced through the protective barrier and sliced the queen beneath the arm, to skitter away.

Cheran appeared beside me. “We need to work on your aim.” My champards flinched, weapons ready. Cheran held out six blades, wordlessly asking permission to touch the tanto.

“You try it with broken ribs,” I said, breathless. I waved off the champards and offered the Flame blade. He touched them to my weapon, making sparks each time. Faster than I could see, he threw them. All six struck the queen, five penetrating joints, one piercing over her heart. If the beast had a heart. Her screams rose in pitch, tinny through the broken shield. Black smoke came from her wounds. Her flesh began to darken. In her rage, she kicked Rose hard, in the ribs. My twin twitched on the floor, retching. My vision darkened in rage, but there was nothing I could do. The pain in my own side stabbed hard, stealing my breath.

“What’s the plan?” Cheran asked, patting his pockets, pulling more blades.

“Last time there was a fight, you ran away,” I said, sounding puny and hating it. I offered the tanto again, and he touched three small, palm-sized blades to the Flame.

“That was last time. Let’s just say I had some bad advice,” Cheran said, face tight. He slapped a metal amulet into my pocket. My pain level dropped dramatically. “That should help with the broken ribs. You breathing okay?”

“No,” I said, trying unsuccessfully for a clean, deep breath. “I’m not.” His conjure was a lot more powerful than mine. Maybe I should have let him teach me. Then again, thinking about his poisons, maybe not.

“Cough? Hemo or pneumo-thorax?”

I was pretty sure he was asking me if I had blood or air in my lungs. “Fighting it, and maybe.” I didn’t know if Cheran was regretting not fighting before or rebelling against orders not to fight now, but it didn’t matter. I gestured with the tanto to the descending seraphs. “Soon as the last one lands, I figure the conjure containing the scents will be disrupted and the succubi will drive the seraphs insane. Rupert had a prediction, a partially prophetic dream about this. It didn’t end well,” I said.

“Partially?”

“Yeah. I gave away the sword that was part of the dream.” I looked again at Rose. She was on her side, facing away from me. I hoped she was unconscious.

“Dang, woman,” Eli said from the side, checking his flamethrower and handguns, shadows making arcs on the stone wall behind him. “You’re tellin’ an awful lot to a chicken-ass stranger.” Cheran ignored him and Eli shook his head. “Not much fuel left. Only a couple extra clips of our special ammo. I can’t use a sword worth spit. And even over the conjure that’s keeping down the stink, I smell spawn.”

Twice, I too had scented devil-spawn. I looked at the Ravens. The winged warriors had spread out, moving bent-kneed in widening arcs, sniffing the air. Something was getting through to them. “Think you can pierce that shield?” I asked Cheran, offering the tanto for blessing again. He tried, but the throwing knife bounced away and spun into the night. Cheran shrugged.

The seraphs overhead were still descending, but their flight was measured. They seemed to be moving through a veil of black-light sparkles, in slow motion. The Dragon was slowing them. That was probably another of the things it wasn’t supposed to be able to do, like transmogrify and take a bath in the river of time. If Azazel could manipulate seraphs in flight, then he could do almost anything. We were so toast.

We could be here a month, a day, or an hour. Maybe our air would hold out beneath the conjures. Maybe we would all die of suffocation. Maybe we could roast a couple of succubus snails for dinner. Chuckling at my own morbid whimsy, I pulled a bottle of water from a low pocket on my cloak and drank while I had the chance. Beside me, Eli did the same.

I figured Azazel was off somewhere, sometime, healing his wounds, so he could fight his little war healthy. It looked like the Dark Prince had planned for all contingencies, even his own wounding. I screwed the top back on and tucked the bottle into my cloak.

“Cheran, can you still kill spawn at a distance, burning them the way you did before?”

“Oh yeah. Of course I could do it better if you gave me back my anklet.”

“Not gonna happen, mage boy,” Eli said for me.

“I figured.” The mage flipped two knives, blades flashing in the light of the illumination amulets. He caught them deftly, a cocky grin reshaping his face. “We need weapons, Consulate General.”

“No shit,” Eli said.

I had pulled the longsword when I landed against the wall, and Azazel had thrown the femur. I checked the position of the succubus, arms flailing at the Flames, the form of Jane shrieking like a fishwife. My sister lay nearby on the church’s burned, scarred floor, still breathing, but drugged or unconscious. Blood coated Rose’s neck where the queen had fed.

I couldn’t tell if my twin still had her amulets. Rose was an earth mage, like the new acting priestess of Enclave. She needed something alive, or once alive, to cast a conjure. Or an amulet made of something that lived or once lived. I had a few thoughts about that, but anything I could figure out had to be a last-ditch effort to destroy the Dragon because they were drastic measures and we were all going to go blooey. A bloody messy way to die.

I walked, mostly upright, to the spot where I had first landed. A dim glow showed me my longsword, deep under the muck of slime. “Ducky,” I said, and plunged my hand into the glop. I pulled the sword free and, wishing for wash water, cleaned it off on my cloak.

“You might think that slime would be acidic,” Cheran said conversationally.

Eli, who had moved with us, said, “You’d think.”

“Eli, are you guarding me?” I asked.

“Just followin’ orders, ma’am.” He rested his hands, fingers hanging loosely, on his gun butts. “Your head champard suggested it might be wise.”

“Mmmm.” It wasn’t much of a response but it was all I had. “Cheran, you want to help? Open up your mage-sight and look around. You see a big bone? A femur bone of a seraph.”

“You mean like this one?” He toed the tip of the bone with his foot. He had been standing on it, and no way did I think he hadn’t known. Best bet, he had spotted it in mage-sight and was planning on claiming it for himself, though his face looked bland and innocent.

I pushed him away and fished Barak’s bone from between two rocks. It still retained a lavender glow from the snake-wheels. I now had my swords, one Flame-blessed, one with my bloodstone prime amulet, and a seraph bone given in sacrifice; I still had the Dragon’s link; and my pain was receding. With a flash of thought, I felt around in my dobok for the cross, not finding it. Beneath a particularly deep glop of muck, I spotted it. I cleaned the cross in the wan light. “Yeah,” I said softly. “Okay.” I was ready to get my sister back from a succubus bitch.

“Audric,” I called, now able to shout. When the big man looked up I said, “Remember that errand I sent you on? Do you still have them with you?”

“Yes, mistrend. I do.”

Ignoring the formal word, I said, “I’d like them now, please.”

Audric came forward and knelt at my feet. Shock flashed through me. I was about to order him to get up when I realized he was on the ground so he could open a canvas satchel.

I swallowed back the command. Seraph stones. Can I be any more stupid? Audric knelt at my feet to swear fealty, not as a matter of habit. He might kneel for me if he screwed up and drew my blood while practicing. Or not. Audric flipped back the top of the satchel.

Inside were stones that looked like black opals to my human sight, but when viewed with mage-sight, appeared as Dark and Light in one conjure. Thin, blue, wirelike strands of Light overlaid and enwrapped the Dark amulet-bombs.

Audric said, “Things are going to get interesting shortly.” Eli snorted at Audric’s word choice, but the big half-breed went on. “Throw these, or use them as land mines?”

I considered the playing field and the number of the opals. Someone could lose a hand throwing them. “Set them up as mines.” Audric nodded his approval.

I experimented with a deep breath. My lungs ached and creaked like rubber folded over and rubbing against itself. The rib bones were sharp and grinding, but Cheran’s handy-dandy amulet was working. I swung my blades, the motion painful but not debilitating. I checked the position of my weapons and tucked the femur into my belt, the cross looped through beside it.

The Waldroup brothers shuffled closer, exhaustion clear in their postures. Ernest touched the shield separating us from the Ravens and jerked back when it shocked him. “One question,” Shamus said, blinking into the night, steadying his brother when the old man wavered on his feet. “Why didn’t the Dragon attack us in small groups? Why do all this?”

“I think it wants the flying wonders to mate with the succubus queen,” Eli said in disgust. “I think it set this up so seraphs will sin, so they’ll be forced to join the Dark against the Host. That Final Battle humans fought a hundred years ago? It ain’t over. That’s what I think.”

“They been taking a breather for a hundred years?” Shamus asked me, incredulous.

I looked up, shrugging. The seraphs had tilted and tucked their wings to land. The Ravens seemed to see them for the first time, their motions slowing to match the diminished speed of the descending three, as if caught in the time change. “I agree with Eli,” I said.

“And your twin?”

“I’m going after her. Forcas and the Dragon took her and kept her alive for some reason. We get her back and we mess up some part of the plan.”

“We need to be fighting before the seraphs land,” Cheran said. At Eli’s blank look he said, “Mage-heat. I’m already feeling it, thanks to our winged friend here. It’s going to get worse when the conjure that’s keeping the smells down is canceled and the seraphs and you humans smell the succubus and larvae. It’s going to be a mating orgy in the middle of a bloodbath. If we’re fighting, Thorn and I won’t be affected and we can stop it.” After a slight pause he added, “Maybe.”

I didn’t trust Cheran any more than I could throw him, uphill, over my shoulder. But he was right. Pulling three amulets off of my necklace, I said, “We need to get through the queen’s shield. I have anticonjure amulets, which may work now that it’s damaged, but they kind of explode.” I was just glad they hadn’t gone off when I pressed them into the shield. How stupid could I get?

Eli laughed. “More than just kinda explode. They’ll rock your world.” He raised his voice. “Down, everybody. Thorn’s going inside.”