Honeyed Words (42 page)

Only I wasn’t breathing. Of course. I looked down. I was there, but not there. I looked around. I’d been in the house with Katie, and I’d reached out to touch … I whirled, and the ghosties spun around Qindra, faster and faster. Their hunger was palpable.

“Qindra?”

She did not turn, did not move, but the energy field around her did not falter. She was a woman besieged. I had to help her.

Of course, I’d gone walkabout. Astral projection is the proper term, but somehow when I touched Qindra, I was sucked into this place.

I waded forward. Gram was solid in my grip. The blade moved through the ghosts like cutting smoke. The first fell to the ground shrieking, and several of its friends broke away to consume the fallen.

The faster I cut them down, the more a few of them grew, until soon there were only a few, half a dozen of them at most, growing, blobs of negative energy. The total assault on Qindra had not slowed, only become more concentrated, and I could see cracks forming in her shield.

I had to do something different.

On the wall behind her I noticed an oblong object that floated just out of reach. I willed myself around Qindra and the energy well until I could get a better look.

It was a Valkyrie shield, tall and elegant but scarred with fire and talon. It was my shield, or rather it belonged to the Valkyrie Gunnr. She had given it to me when I went to face the dragon. How had it come to be here?

For a moment I was at the lake. Jean-Paul was charging toward me, flaming, and I was screaming, rushing forward, taking his flame on the shield as I stabbed with Gram.

I’d fallen then, burned and weakened nearly to my death. But the shield had fallen where I lay. Later, after the Valkyrie caught up with me, they helped me back onto the flying horse, Meyja, helped me fly home to Katie and Black Briar, but none of us had taken the shield.

Why was it here?

The shield floated in a stream of energy, clean energy that flowed through the shield and emerged black and tainted. This sickly power then shot upward into the world, under Anezka’s house.

I was beneath the house. The shield was corrupting the power, poisoning the world above.

I reached out to take the shield, to pull it from the edge of the energy stream that roared from the ground like the natural gas flames I used in the forge. The moment I touched it pain and fear exploded inside me.

A vision unfolds, vivid and silent. A young man creeps along the shore of a battered lake as the Valkyrie and I fly over the tree line. He kneels at Jean-Paul’s broken corpse and falls to his knees, wailing soundlessly. I watch, mesmerized, as he pulls his own hair out in great fistfuls, screeching to the heavens. After a moment, he rips off his shirt, and sops his hands in Jean-Paul’s blood. I recognized this maddened figure from the picture Anezka had shown me—the three naked lovers at the Oregon Stone Henge. He was Anezka’s lover, Justin. He paints his face and chest with great swirls of smoking black blood—scarring his face and torso.

Finally, he sees my shield lying to the side and drags Jean-Paul’s body onto it, pulls a knife from his boot, and bleeds Jean-Paul onto the shield. Then he cuts Jean-Paul’s heart from his broken chest. He holds the bleeding muscle to the sky, chanting wildly, and then bites into the heart.

Power erupts around him, tendrils of light weaving in with the blood and the shield. Finally, he uses his knife to cut deeply into his own abdomen and lies on the shield, allowing his blood to mingle with Jean-Paul’s. The shield glows with a bright blue flare. Justin floats upward, spinning in the air, the remains of Jean-Paul’s bloody heart held to the sky in one bloody fist.

He screams as his body smokes.

The wound in his abdomen closes, leaving behind a violent white scar. His hair is streaked white from where he ran his bloody hands through the locks. His face and torso are scarred with puckered pink handprints and smears. The scene fades into mist.

I jerked my hand from the shield and whirled around.

“You see?” Qindra asked.

The shield acted as a filter, polluting the energy flowing from the nexus. The power here was incredible. No wonder Anezka had grown erratic. Control of the amulet had shielded her at first, but with it switching allegiance, that no longer protected her. Once Qindra broke the shield that Flora had managed to create here, things went from bad to worse. The tainted flow was unimpeded. The broken things, shades and foul spirits, suddenly had a vibrant flame to flock to.

And here, in the flux and the chaos of the vortex, a great beast rose from the grave. I could taste his taint in the energy, feel his aura in the black power that coursed through this place.

“Jean-Paul,” I screamed, and the eating things swung their great attention toward me.

“Come on,” I called to them. “Come to your final death.”

One of the great eaters spun away from Qindra and flew at me, but it was nothing compared to my fear and anger. I cut through it like it didn’t exist. I was a mad woman, crazed and out of control. I yearned for the berserker, craved the mindless violence that would clear the horde that stood before me.

For the dragon was there. He fell from the house, a solid mass of shadow and smoke, beautiful and terrible. He turned his great gaze upon me. For a second he seemed disoriented, but his laughter echoed into the hall, and unfathomable hordes of nether creatures flew from his great form.

“Eat her; shred her,” he called, laughing in his madness. The madness I had stilled once already, the voice I had sundered with this very blade.

I fought like a dervish, cutting through the monsters, fighting my way to Qindra. If I could free her, somehow, I had a chance.

Before long, I was covered in black welts and weeping sores. This was my spirit, I knew, but the pain was real, and the ice of the monsters’ touch burned brighter than I had ever imagined.

Then, as suddenly as it started, I was free from them, free from the burning and the biting. I fell to my knees, weak and joyous. Gram clattered to the ground, and Qindra touched my forehead.

“Be healed,” she said, her voice hoarse and raw.

I was inside the sphere, inside her protective circle.

“What the hell’s going on?” I gasped.

“Hel is right,” she said. “The dragons have killed the gods, down to the last dregs, and Hel has been closed for time out of mind. They,” she waved at the black creatures that spun about the room, diving into the field, only to be broken and consumed by the others, “should go to the underworld; they have been trapped here on Migard for thousands of years.”

“Um, ghosts?” I asked. “You’d think we would’ve heard about this sooner.”

“Things have shifted, Sarah.” I could see how tired she was. “You broke the covenant; you cracked the world, and this is what has come out to play.”

I looked out to the swirling spirits as they fell upon one another. Jean-Paul reveled among them, consuming any that drew near him.

“I’ve tried to reinstate the barrier over the property,” she said. “They cannot escape, but they are being drawn here every minute.”

“And I saw Jean-Paul,” I said, watching the energy rise into a fountain. She had diverted a thread from the nexus, pulled it to her. It bathed us, filling me with vigor.

Qindra watched me for a moment and shook her head. “It is seductive, this power,” she said.

“What are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” she offered. “Did any of my people get away?”

The look on my face told her all she needed. I could feel the sorrow bleeding from her, sending tiny cracks into the shield.

Qindra looked at me sadly. “We cannot leave,” she said.

“Katie is out there,” I said, grabbing her hand. “I’ve got to get back to her.”

“It’s taking everything I can muster to keep the barrier up,” she said. “I cannot get you out of here. Your only hope is Katie, I’m afraid. If she can free you somehow, you may have a chance.” She was earnest. “I just cannot risk letting this madness escape.”

Well, that was a gut punch. Trapped here forever in a house of horrors. “I guess it’s in Katie’s hands then,” I offered.

“I just don’t understand how the shield came to be here.”

“He brought it,” I said. “The necromancer. He was Anezka’s lover.”

She twitched, sending a ripple into the air around us. The shield vibrated for a moment and a face appeared, young and lean. Justin floated above the shield. Words flowed through the ether, gibberish to me, but in a language that Qindra seemed to understand.

“He was a disciple of Jean-Paul’s,” she whispered. “He used Anezka to get access to the nexus. Used her and tortured her while all the time he worked for that bastard.” She pointed across the cavern.

The dragon swirled in and out of focus, the great beast trying to hold its shape in the madness of the other creatures that flooded the room.

“When I killed Jean-Paul, he was there. At the lake. I saw it all when I touched the shield.”

Qindra looked sickened, weak.

“The shield has been reforged in flame—imbued with both Jean-Paul’s and Justin’s essence, and their blood,” I said.

“Aye,” she said with a nod, “but it also contains your blood and some of your spirit.” She looked up at me. “It holds Jean-Paul to this place. Ties his spirit to this world. But it also feeds this necromancer, gives him access to this energy.”

Of course, that was the missing link. When he’d visited recently … what had Bub said? five months? Not long after I killed Jean-Paul. That’s when he planted the shield. That’s when the madness really began to overwhelm Anezka.

“What can we do?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Not yet.” She began chanting again. The sagging force-wall strengthened, and the spirits were thrown back. “But I must concentrate,” she said, exhausted. “I must keep the monsters from being loosed upon the world.”

I knelt down, brushed the hair from her eyes, and kissed her on the forehead. She was feverish, but strong. I willed some of my power to her.

“I broke the original seal,” she said with a weak smile. “When you brought me here. The woman who carved the supports wove the field about this place.” She pointed to Justin, whose image floated beyond Jean-Paul. “His first lover. She knew. She sensed all this. That is why the barrier was there, why the carvings are all through the house. You have not seen them all; they are powerful and frightening. All the better to hold the spirits here, to keep their dark yearnings confused and trapped.” Her voice was growing fainter as her concentration grew stronger. “My fault,” she said and then fell silent.

I picked up Gram and stood, waiting for the wall to fall, for the time when I would give my life to protect her.

Oh, my dear Katie. I hoped she was okay in the house. Might have been a bad idea to bring her after all. “Are you there?” I asked. “Can you see what I see?”

Fifty-eight

Katie tensed for the killing blow, but it did not come. Jean-Paul drew back, shock on his fluid face. “
She
is here?” he bellowed. “This should hold you.”

He lunged at Katie, opened his mouth, and breathed. Smoky blue flames erupted from his mouth.

Katie rolled across the floor. The flames smashed against the kitchen cabinet and splattered across the room. Blue slime covered Katie’s shoulder and back as she scrabbled under the broken table, reaching for her guitar.

She had to save Sarah. Jean-Paul reared back once more and sucked in for another breath.

“No flame?” Jean-Paul roared, obviously confused.

Katie grabbed her guitar and pulled it to her chest. More shades were flowing into the house, but Jean-Paul turned at them, snapping them up. Each one seemed to bolster him, give him more density.

The blue ectoplasm began to smoke across the tile and up the cabinet. Katie felt a burning itch in her back. She rolled farther under the table, sliding the guitar to the side and pulling her jacket off. The sludge on her jacket was smoldering, like electric blue Jell-O made of battery acid.

Jean-Paul roared, thrashing about, and pulled his great forelegs through the ceiling, manifesting more of his bulk.

“Hide from me, little bug,” he said, laughing. “I will deal with your lover first. You are not going anywhere.”

With a sound like a sonic boom, Jean-Paul dove through the floor, leaving a scattering of crawling and biting things in his wake. They moved as one, flowing across the living room toward the kitchen. The first few that arrived smashed into the ectoplasm and flitted into vapor, but the next wave learned and moved around.

Katie looked around desperately. Taking her guitar, she began to strum, her hands shaking. A feeble light sprung from her, but it would not keep them all at bay. She was too weak, too afraid.

Then she saw it. She knew it from Sarah’s description. The box that Qindra had shown her lay against the wall, spilled from the table when the room had been wrecked. She crawled to the back corner, grabbed the box, and ripped open the lid. The vial lay nestled in its Bubble Wrap home.

The first horrors reached her, scrambled up over her shoes. The first bite on her leg convinced her of her path. They were eating her, not her flesh, but the spirit. Each bite was a flash of pain like a burning ember.