Changes (29 page)

“Fast and hard.”

Her voice turned wry. “How did I know you’d want it like that?”

I let out a short bark of genuine laughter. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with one thing on his mind.”

“Oh, when we were younger, certainly,” she replied. “Now, though, our roles have reversed.”

“Meaning you want it fast and hard, too?”

She gave me a sly and very heated look with her dark eyes from beneath her dark lashes. “Let’s just say that there’s something to be said for that, once in a while.” She spun the table leg in a few circles. I watched. She stopped and glanced at me, arching an eyebrow inquisitively.

My godmother might have tipped me off to a cure, a way to free Susan of the creature that had devoured half of her being and thirsted for me, something the Fellowship of St. Giles had been trying—and failing—to do for hundreds of years. It was possible that, with a bit more work, I could make it happen for her, give her back control of her life.

But even if I did, we couldn’t be together. Not now.

Mab was bad enough . . . and Hell’s bells, I hadn’t even
thought
about it, I’d been so busy, but Mab’s understudy, Maeve, the Winter Lady, was arguably more psychotic than Mab herself. And she was unarguably pet-tier, more vicious, and more likely to want to play games with anyone close to me.

I wondered how long it would take me to lose myself. Weeks? Months? Neither Mab nor Maeve would want me to remain my own man. I wondered if, when I was what they wanted me to be, it would bother me to remember what I had been. What others had meant to me.

All I said was, “I miss you.”

She looked down and away, blinking. Then she gave me a rather hesitant smile as a tear fell—as if it were something she hadn’t done in a while, and was still remembering how to accomplish it. “I miss joking with you.”

“How could you do it?” I asked quietly. “How could you not tell me about her?”

“By tearing out a piece of myself,” she said quietly. “I know it was wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it, and that . . . that I was going to regret it someday. But I had to keep her safe. I’m not asking you to forgive. Just . . . just understand.”

I thought about that moment of stillness and choice at the Stone Table.

“Yeah,” I said. I lifted a hand and touched her face with my fingertips. Then I leaned over to kiss her forehead. “I do understand.”

She stepped closer and we hugged. She felt surprisingly slender and fragile in my arms. We stayed that way for a little while, both of us feeling the fear of what was coming. We tried to ignore the hundreds of red eyes watching us. We more or less succeeded.

Another cannon clap of sound echoed around the vast hall, and the Erlking said, “Red hunters. Let your chosen champions enter the circle or else forfeit the trial.”

“Okay,” I said. “The Eebs will be tough but they’re doable. They rely on stealth tactics, and this is going to be as straight up as you can get. I’m going to hit them with something that should give you enough time to close. Take whichever one is on the left. Move too far to the right and you’ll be in my line of fire, so don’t. You smash one, I burn the other, and we go get some custom coffee mugs to memorialize the occasion later.”

Susan said, “I stopped drinking coffee. You know, the caffeine.”

I looked at her with mock disgust. “You heathen.”

“Fine!” Esmerelda said from the far side of the circle. She pointed a finger at one of the vampires trapped beneath the goblins’ nets. “You. You do it.” Impatiently, the tiny woman went to the trapped vampire, hideous and inhuman in its true form, and sliced through the odd material of the net with her nails, freeing the captive. Without ceremony, she pitched the vampire into the circle.

One of her foot soldiers? Okay. This might be easier than I’d thought.

Esteban appeared then, walking calmly forward.

The slowly accelerating
lub-dub
sound of the Devourer’s unsettling heartbeat came with him. The Devourer loomed over Esteban, horrible and hungry-looking, and at a command from the vampire, it shambled forward into the circle, its all-black eyes staring at us with unnerving intensity. I might have been projecting or something, but it seemed to me that the Ick was spoiling for some payback.

“Oh, crap,” Susan said in a very small voice.

“When the circle is closed,” said the Erlking’s deep baritone, “the trial begins. It will conclude when one party has been neutralized. Do the champions of the Red hunters stand ready?”

All of the vampires let out wailing shrieks, and even the Ick emitted a hissing burble, like an overfull teakettle.

“What are we going to do?” Susan whispered frantically.

I had no idea. “You take the scrub,” my mouth said. “I’ll handle the Devourer.”

“Right,” she said, her eyes wide. “Right.”

The Erlking appeared, halfway between the two parties, standing outside the circle. “Sir Knight! Do you and the lady huntress stand ready?”

We both nodded sharply, though our eyes were fixed upon our opponents, not the Erlking. I began drawing in my will, and power seethed in my belly and chest and became an odd pressure behind my eyes.

The Erlking drew his sword and held it high, and every goblin in the place began roaring. Fire licked up the blade of the sword, wreathing it in green flame, and then he dropped the sword, thrusting its tip into the trough in the stone the goblins had dug.

Green goblin fire flared up with a howl and clouds of foul smoke. It raced around the exterior of the circle in both directions, until the two tongues of flame met at the point opposite where they had begun.

Susan screamed. I screamed. The vampire screamed. The Ick . . . did that teakettle thing.

And then we all started trying to kill one another.

37

Vampires and Icks are fast, but I’d dueled their like before. Like the apocryphal Loki, my previous opponents had learned that no matter how quick you are on your feet, you aren’t faster than thought.

The spell I’d been holding ready lashed out before either of our opponents had moved more than a couple of feet, naked force howling out from my outstretched hand to seize not the Ick, but, in a sudden flash of inspiration, I directed it at the vampire beginning to bound along beside and a little behind it. Clearly, maybe even wisely, the vamp was hoping to stand in the Devourer’s shadow when the hurt started flying.

I cried out, “
Forzare!
” and my raw will hammered the vampire down and at an oblique angle—directly in front of and beneath the feet of the Ick.

If you have no weapons with which to fight the enemy, find a way to make your enemy
be
your weapon. If you can pull it off, it makes you look amazing.

The vampire went under the Ick’s feet with a wailing squeal and a crunchy-sounding splatter of vile fluids. The collision tripped up the massive hunting creature as its legs tangled with the vampire’s rubbery, sinuous limbs, and the Ick came crashing to the ground, its unnatural drumbeat heart thudding loud and furious, swiping and smashing in fury at the entanglement without ever bothering to consider what it might be destroying.

Susan adjusted almost instantly to what had happened, and closed on the sprawling Ick with incredible speed. Her arm blurred as the Ick began recovering its balance, smashing her club straight down onto its skull and driving its head down to rebound from the floor.

The Ick took the hit like it was a love tap, slashing at Susan with its claws—but she had already bounded into the air, jerking her knees up to avoid the grabbing claws and flying clear over the Devourer to a roar of approval from the watching goblins. She landed in a baseball player’s slide and shot forward over the gore-smeared stone, snapping one hand back to grab the throat of the downed vampire as she did.

The battered body came free of the Ick’s limbs, minus a limb or two of its own, and thrashed weakly, slowing Susan’s slide and stopping her forward motion a bare inch before her feet would have slid into the green flame surrounding the fighting ring.

The Ick whirled around as it staggered to its feet again, preparing to pursue her, when I lifted my blasting rod, snarled, “
Fuego
,” and hammered it with all the power I could shove through the magical focus. Blue-white fire, blindingly bright against the rather dim green flames of the Erlking’s will, drew a group scream of surprise and discomfort from the gathered goblins. The fire struck the Ick and gouged a chunk of black, rubbery flesh the size of a watermelon out of the massive muscles of its back. Its head whipped back so sharply that the top of its head practically touched its own spine, and it lost its balance for another second or two, slipping on the gore the first vampire had provided as it turned toward me.

I dimly took note of Susan as this happened. The half-crushed, half-dismembered vampire flailed wildly with its remaining claws and fangs, putting up an insanely desperate, vicious fight in an attempt to hang on to its life.

Susan took a hard blow to the side of the head, and when she turned back, her lip was bloodied, her teeth bared in a snarl, and the dark swirls and points of her tattoos began to spread over her face like black ink dripped upon water. She dropped the improvised club, got both hands on the vampire’s throat, and, with calm, precise strength, thrust its head into the green fire.

There was a bloody explosion as that fire devoured the vampire, and though its heat had seemed no greater than any campfire’s, the temperature within that fire had to be something as hot as the sun. As the vampire’s skull entered it, it simply disintegrated with a howl of vaporized liquids, spattering tiny bits of bone like shrapnel and covering Susan and the dying vampire both in an enormous, dark, foul-smelling cloud.

“Susan!” I shouted, and darted over to one side so that I wouldn’t be loosing blasts of fire blindly into that cloud if I missed. I hit the Devourer, gouging out a small trough in one of its arms, missed with the third blast, and scored with a fourth, burning a scorch mark as wide as my thigh across its hip. The drumbeat of its heart was a huge, pounding rhythm by now, like the double bass drums of a speed-metal band. The hits seemed only to make it more furious, and it shifted into a controlled forward rush meant to crowd me into the outer ring of fire or else leave me unable to escape its grasping claws.

But either the blow on the noggin or one of the blasts I’d unleashed had slowed the Ick down. I sprinted for the angle on its approach, for the path that would let me evade the Devourer and its outstretched claws, and got clear of its attack, beating the monster out on footwork and keeping from being trapped against the circle’s perimeter as it came at me.

I found a fierce smile spreading over my lips as I moved. I kept hurling blasts at its legs as I ran, attempting to slow it even more. I didn’t hit with more than a quarter of them, I think, but the missed bolts of fire splashed against the Erlking’s green fire in sizzling bursts of light. The adrenaline made my senses crystalline, bringing me every sight and sound with a cold purity, and I suddenly saw where the Devourer was weakest.

Though it was hard to tell with its alien movement, I realized that it was favoring one side ever so slightly. I darted in for a better look, nearly got my head ripped off by a flailing fist, and saw that the Ick’s leg was wounded, low on the back of its thigh, where the black flesh was twisted and mangled. Had it been mortal skin and tissue, I would have thought it the result of a severe burn—as long as whatever had done the burning had been molten-metal hot and shaped like Mouse’s teeth. The Foo dog had gotten to the Ick during its encounter with Thomas, with a wound that had threatened to cripple it. That was why it had been forced to withdraw. If it stayed and Mouse had managed another such strike, it would have been entirely immobilized.

“Good luck this time, big guy,” I heard myself say. “You’ve got nowhere to run.”

The part of my mind that was still mostly sane thought the statement was utterly crazy. Maybe stupid, too. The Ick was still chasing
me
, after all. If it hit me once with one of those enormous, clawed hands, it would liquefy the bones under whichever part of my body it hit. (With the possible exception of my head. I maintain that all evidence seems to point to the fact that someone did one of those adamantium upgrades on my skull when I wasn’t looking.)

I was scrambling and blasting away for all I was worth, and I couldn’t keep up a pace like that forever. I was scoring on the Ick, maybe slowing it even more, but I wasn’t even close to killing it.

It all came down to a simple question: Was the Ick better at taking it than I was at dishing it out? If so, then I was living on borrowed time, and the continuing onslaught of magic I threw at the thing amounted to an extremely high rate of interest.

Before I could find out, the fight changed.

The Ick made a painful-looking surge of effort, and got close enough to hit me. I barely got out of the way in time, almost fell, turned it into several spinning steps instead, and recovered my balance. The Ick turned to follow, and Susan burst out of the cloud of greasy smoke the instant it turned its back.

Her tattoos had flushed from black to a deep, deep crimson, and she moved with perfect grace and in perfect silence. So when she gracefully, silently swung that steel table leg at the side of the Ick’s knee joint—on its unmarred leg, no less—it took the monster entirely off guard.

There was a sharp, terrible crack, a sound that I would have associated only with falling timber or possibly small-caliber gunfire if I’d heard it somewhere else. The steel bar smashed the Ick’s knee unnaturally inward, until it made an angle of nearly thirty degrees.

It bellowed in agony and one arm swept back toward its attacker. The Ick hit Susan, and though it had been off balance, startled, and falling when it did so, it still knocked her ten feet backward and to the ground. Her club bounced out of her hand with a chiming, metallic clang, and tumbled, ringing like a tinny gong, into the circling flames.

The heat within the green fires sliced off half the table leg as neatly as any high-temperature torch possibly could have done. The colors of the flame briefly striated with tendrils of amber, violet, and coppery red. The severed end rolled free of the fire, and its edge was glowing white-hot.

I noticed it in the periphery of my heightened vision.

Susan had landed on the ground with her back twisted at an impossible angle.

The Ick lurched toward me as I stood there, frozen in shock for the briefest of instants. It was more than enough time for the Devourer to close, rake at me with its claws, and bat me twenty feet across the circle, all at the same time.

Again, the spells on my coat withstood the brute power of the Ick’s claws, but this hadn’t been a glancing blow, or incidental damage collected when it had tripped over me. This was a full-on sledgehammer slam of the kind that had probably tossed the
Blue Beetle
onto Thomas’s sports car du jour. It was exactly what I had dreaded, and as my body hit the ground, a kind of resolved calm washed over me, along with howls of goblin excitement.

I was a dead man. Simple as that. The only question was whether or not I would survive long enough to feel the pain that the shock of impact was delaying. And, of course, where to aim my death curse.

My limp arms and legs slowed my tumble and I wound up on my back with my hips twisted to one side as the Ick threw back its head and let out a burbling, teakettle scream. Its heart pounded like surreal thunder, and my body suddenly felt awash with cold, as if I’d landed in a pool of icy water. The Ick came at me, pain showing in its movements now. It howled and lifted both arms above its head, ready to smash them down onto my skull. I didn’t have much time to use my death curse, said the little sane voice in my head.

And then another voice in my head, one far louder and more furious, screamed denial. My few glimpses of Maggie whirled through my mind, along with images of her death—or worse—at Arianna’s hands. If I died here, there would be no one to take her out of darkness.

I had to try.

I thrust both fists at the Ick’s least injured leg and let go with every energy ring I had left.

I guess from the outside it must have looked like one of those kung fu-type double fist strikes, though the only thing my actual fists were doing was collecting a new round of bruises and little scars. The energy released from the rings, though, kicked the Ick’s leg so hard that it swept out parallel to the floor. The Ick toppled.

I rolled desperately, and escaped being crushed by its bulk by a hairbreadth. It landed in whistling agony.

And I suddenly saw a way to kill it that would never have been visible to me if I hadn’t been flat on my back and looking up.

I raised the blasting rod to point at the ceiling above, deeply shadowed but still barely visible. It was a natural cavern roof. The floor might have been carved and polished smooth to host the Erlking’s hall, but stalactites the size of city buses hung from the ceiling like some behemoth’s grim teeth. I checked to be sure that Susan was on the far side of the circle, as far away as possible from what I was about to bring down.

Then I hurled my fear and rage at the base of a great stone fang that was almost directly overhead, and put almost everything I had left into it.

Blue-white fire screamed through the blasting rod, so intense that the rune-carved implement itself exploded into a cloud of glowing splinters. It hit the far- above stalactite with a thunderous concussion. Beside me, the Ick rose up and reached for my skull with one enormous hand.

I threw up my hands, hissed, “
Aparturum
,” and, with the last of my will, ripped open the veil between the Erlking’s hall and the material world, tearing open a circular opening maybe four feet across—and floating three feet off the ground and parallel to the floor, oriented so that its entry point was on its upper side. Then I curled up into a fetal position beneath that opening and tried to cover my head with my arms.

Tons and
tons
of stone tumbled down with slow, deadly grace. The Devourer’s heartbeat redoubled its pace. Then there was an incredible noise, and the whole world was blotted away.

I lay there on my side for several moments, not daring to move. Stone fell for a while, maybe a couple of minutes, before the sounds of falling rocks slowly died away, like the pops from a pan of popcorn just before it starts to burn. Only, you know, rockier.

Only then did I allow myself to lift my head and look around.

I lay in a perfectly circular four-foot-across tomb that was maybe five feet deep. The sides of the tomb were perfectly smooth, though I could see from all the cracks and crevices that they were made from many mismatched pieces of rock, ranging from one the size of my fist to a boulder half as big as a car.

Above me, the open Way glowed slightly. All the stone that would have fallen on me had instead plunged through the open Way and back into the material world.

I took a deep breath and closed it again. I hoped that no one was hanging around wherever it was that Way emptied out. Maybe in the FBI cafeteria? No way to know, except to go through and look. I didn’t want to face the collateral damage of something like that.

My sane brain pointed out that there was every chance that we weren’t talking about falling stones at all. As matter from the spirit world, they would transform to simple ectoplasm when they reached the material world, unless ongoing energy was provided in order to preserve their solidity. I certainly hadn’t been trying to pump any energy into the stones as they hit the Way. So odds were that I just dumped several dozen tons of slime onto a random spot in the FBI building—and slime that would evaporate within moments. It would grossly reduce the chances of inflicting injuries on some hapless FBI staffer.