Apocalyptic Mojo (6 page)

In addition to the smoke spewing from the top, the volcano was encircled in hazy rings at precise intervals all down its height. Ardith’s nose twitched in the pungent air. There was a definite twinge of sulfur in the stench. “Are we here?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he? Where’s the Watcher?”

Draigh pointed to the column of smoke billowing overhead.

She frowned. “He’s at the top of this volcano? Impossible. Nobody could survive the heat and lava.”

Amazingly, Draigh didn’t argue, he simply raised a palm and called his guide. As the blue sparks gathered, Ardith looked around, curious. She’d never stood at the base of a volcano before. Strangely, the devastation formed a perfect circle around the mountain’s base, bowed up at the edges as if having met an invisible shield. Or as if it was being held in by magic.

Draigh’s guide sparked and spit angrily and he swore. “Grab hold of me, witch, and do not let go. This could get ugly.”

Her eyes widened. “We’re not going underground are we?”

He started to flicker, his handsome face taut with pain. He wrapped his free arm around behind him, tucking her closer.  “Hold on.”

Knowing she would probably regret it, Ardith wrapped her arms around his waist and held on tight.

A heartbeat later her very limbs started to pull apart under a pressure that was unlike anything she’d ever known.

It felt as if her insides were being yanked out through her pores.

She gritted her teeth against the pain, determined not to scream like a girl in front of the hunter. But as their feet left the ground, his head went back on a bellow of pain and all bets were off.

Ardith screeched in his ear as if the hounds of hell nipped at her heels.

Their feet hit something solid and they kept going, sliding across a glossy wood floor and smacking into a wall. Draigh groaned, pushing himself slowly to his feet. He braced himself against the wall, his limbs limp with weariness.

The witch just lay on the ground, breathing heavily. Her arms and legs were sprawled, her thick braid sticking straight up from her head like an exclamation point.

He offered her his hand.

“Is anything going to eat us in the next few minutes?”

He blinked. “I don’t think so.”

“Then I’m staying here. In fact, if going back down hurts that much I’m moving in with the Watcher. Hopefully he can get carry-out pizza up here.”

Draigh felt a smile coming and twisted his lips against it. “Don’t be such a baby, witch.” He twitched his fingers at her and she sighed, pushing herself into a sitting position. “That sucked worse than spending time with you.”

“Even more than listening to you blather on.”

She grabbed his hand and he yanked her to her feet.

“Welcome.”

They turned and Draigh looked upon the Watcher in the flesh for only the second time in his life. Unbidden, Ardith’s dismissal of the Watcher as “that little monkey-like dude” popped into his mind and he almost smiled.

He bowed his head so the Watcher didn’t see and forced a scowl onto his face. The damnable woman was destroying his mind with her drivel. “Eminence.”

To his shock, the witch inclined her head too and remained silent. Apparently she did have at least part of a brain.

The ancient gnome was three feet tall. He wore a dark-green robe that covered his gnarled feet and draped over his hands, showing only the tips of his spidery fingers. He was older than time, his magic stronger than any creature Draigh had ever met, but it was all divinitive magic. He had no defensive magic.

Which was the reason he’d surrounded his lair with a power-stripping weave. When they left the gnome’s lair, the magic of the weave would reverse itself, returning their power. There was nothing quite so painful as having your energy ripped from the cells encompassing it. Except maybe having it returned.

The Watcher flicked his large ears and stroked his beard, his round black eyes sparkling. “Why have you come before me?”

Draigh straightened. “Eminence, we are pursuing a witch who is creating an army of zombies…”

The gnome tilted his head and interrupted him. “Why is she doing this?”

“For protection, we think. She has an apprentice…”

“She wishes to protect this apprentice so she creates an army of zombies?”

Draigh tightened his jaw, striving for patience. The Watcher was wise beyond understanding, but he processed information differently from others. “She values this apprentice above all things. Apparently the humans have be—”

The gnome turned to Ardith. “You are an epoch mage.”

Draigh’s mouth closed with an audible snap.

Ardith cocked a hip and slipped her slender fingers into the pockets of her over-tight pants. “I am.”

“You wish this witch to be captured and killed?”

She slid Draigh a glance. “I do not.”

“Yet you work with the hunter.”

“By elder decree.”

“What do you wish from me?”

“Locate her. Please?”

The gnome smiled, offered her his long-fingered hand. “Come. It is refreshing to converse with one of intelligence.”

As Draigh’s mouth fell open, Ardith slipped her fingers into the Watcher’s hand and accompanied him to the center of the huge, circular room. She slid Draigh a smug smile as she sashayed past.

He squeezed his fists so tight his knuckles cracked. Reluctantly he followed them to the massive scrying ring.

Ardith stopped at the low brick wall encircling the ring and looked down, exclaiming in delight. “That’s the center of the volcano.”

The Watcher grinned, delighted by her reaction.

She leaned on the wall and rested her chin in her hands, teetering dangerously forward to watch the show.

Draigh moved up beside her, ready to grab her if she should start to topple into the ring. At the same time he wondered why he even cared. His life would be easier if he simply gave her a shove.

“You have something of the witch’s?”

Draigh handed him a lock of ebony hair. Ardith frowned and it made him smile. She hadn’t seen him gather it. Hadn’t had the foresight herself.

Who was the intelligent one now?

The Watcher climbed a small platform at the side of the ring and stepped onto the wall, his large flat feet clinging to the bricks as he walked. He moved confidently, circling the ring as if it wasn’t only six-inches wide and perched over a quarter-mile fall into a raging pit of melted rock.

He extended his spidery fingers toward the opening. Far below them, the fiery, boiling mass mounded and bubbled, lifting toward the top of the volcano as his fingers danced on the air. The Watcher walked around the edge as he scried, his small black eyes focused intently on his work.

The lava reached the top of the mountain and began to spill down its sides. The Watcher flung his hands into the air and the molten rock rose into the sky, bounded by what she’d thought was just a column of smoke. She now realized it was a containing web of some kind.

The Watcher grunted, his rosy face shiny with sweat, as he lifted the fiery mixture toward them. Ardith sucked in a breath as the lava continued to rise, until she realized it was coming all the way up, to fill the ring of stone within the room.

She glanced at Draigh, whispering, “He does know what he’s doing right?”

Draigh snorted, pretending to be bored. The truth was, he’d only seen the ancient gnome scry with lava one other time, and it had scared the crap out of him then too.

Heat billowed upward, shoved into the sky from the terrifying rise of boiling rock. Smoke filled the room but, amazingly, as the lava settled into the ring of rock, the smoke disappeared with a soft spitting sound.

The Watcher’s hands moved at an almost impossible speed, his long fingers twisting and spinning in airborne shapes that transcribed themselves to the boiling lava in the ring. As the shapes formed in the glossy surface of the scrying ring, flames rose from the scrolls and swirls. Slowly the swirls moved and reordered until they spelled a name.

Edwige.

The Watcher flung the strand of the witch’s hair into the pool and it exploded on the surface, sending lava into the air above the pool. The lava spun and spit, slowly taking shape, until Edwige’s round, pretty face looked out at them from the center of the roiling pit of lava.

Ardith grinned. “Icy!”

The Watcher turned to her and frowned. “Definitely not icy, witch.”

Ardith’s grin didn’t waver.

The gnome studied her for a moment, apparently trying to figure out if she mocked him, and then turned back to the glossy, fire-colored form hovering over the pit. “What is your current location, Edwige witch?”

The figure wavered, softened and then sharpened again. The face twitched and it took Ardith a beat to realize its lips were moving. “I am in La Cité des Muertas.”

Ardith groaned.

Draigh grinned. “Well, witch, it looks like we’re going to the City of Death.”

“Well, just shit.”

~
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Ardith tucked her filthy shirt into her pants and covered it with the leather jacket. Draigh had refused to let her go back by her place and change again. She felt grimy and her clothes stank. The only thing that made her feel any better at all was the reality that, given their current location, there was a really good chance she was going to get splattered with blood and gore any minute anyway.

Named by a Spanish diplomat in the days after the first nuclear strike, La Cité des Muertas used to be a large city on the West coast of the land mass called the United States of America. It was ground zero for the nuclear war that had razed the entire country.

Though most of the radiation had dispersed over time, nothing even remotely human lived in the city any longer. And nothing even vaguely monstrous avoided it. Including the wide variety of monsters that had happened as a result of radiation poisoning.

Any humans who’d survived the radiation had been altered beyond recognition by the poisoned air and most of the wild animals were transformed. That didn’t even include the magical monsters who, sensing an opportunity to build their own little monster paradise in the world, had flocked to La Cité des Muertas after the bombing.

The inhabitants of the city recognized no governing bodies. No rules, no moral restrictions and no sense of self-control guided them. Without any sort of police presence, it was pure anarchy.

Anarchy among monsters was not a pretty thing.

Aside from Edwige, who was surrounded by her own army of monsters, Ardith and Draigh were most likely the only humanoid creatures in the entire city. They were weaker, less biologically equipped for battle, and less psychologically equipped to deal with what they were going to see there. To the creatures living in the dead city, they were considered a subspecies—little more than meals with heels.

Fun times.

The buildings over the largest part of the city were mostly rubble. Here and there, a single-story building was still standing and the debris had been cleared away from the front so that whatever lived inside the space could move around more easily.

The roads were impassible, with huge chunks of asphalt missing and the remainder split and upended from the earthquakes that had followed the bombs.

The stench of death was nearly overwhelming.

Carcasses littered the streets and spilled from some type of narrow, three-wheeled vehicles that had obviously been engineered to maneuver through the shattered streets and sidewalks.

Draigh reached over and grabbed her arm, halting her as the shadows ahead of them shifted and spit several malformed shapes onto the sidewalk.

Even in the low light of the only unbroken street light a half block away, it was easy to see that the creatures stalking toward them were unlike anything they’d ever seen before.

Built like gargoyles, with oversized heads and canine teeth like tusks, the creatures were hairless, shiny with some kind of oily substance, and left bubbling trails of drool behind as they moved toward Draigh and Ardith.

Enormous claws clanked against the concrete of a broken sidewalk and an impossible girth of muscles bunched when they walked. Their foreheads looked swollen with no gleam beneath, where the eyes should have been. The creatures’ wet snouts moved constantly, their large pointed ears twitched, but they had no eyes to see with.

Ardith grimaced. “What are those things?”

“If I’m not mistaken, they used to be hell hounds. Before they were irradiated.”

There were three of them and as they approached they spread out, obviously hoping to surround Ardith and Draigh.

Draigh pulled his knives. “This will be a quick kill.”

Ardith frowned. “How do you know?”

“Because if we don’t kill them right away, we’re dead. If they bite us, we’re dead. If they scratch us, we’re dead.”

Ardith lifted her hands, calling her magic forward. “I’ll just zap them with witch fire then.”