The Shroud of A'Ranka (Brimstone Network Trilogy) (20 page)

She reached down and grabbed hold of the retreating goddess’s tail.

A’Ranka screamed with the touch, her tail whipping around. But Emily held fast and began to climb the body of the dust goddess, the claws on her hands and feet giving her awful traction as she ascended.

“You dare to touch my flesh?” the ancient goddess wailed.

The storm of dust worsened, blowing ferociously, getting in Emily’s mouth, eyes, and ears. But she continued to climb, and no matter how hard A’Ranka shook and writhed, the wolf held fast.

“To me, my faithful!” the goddess cried over the wail of the winds. “Your goddess has need of you!”

From the corner of her eye Emily saw the vampires turn from their battle with Bogey and Stitch and come swarming toward their new god.

And then a grip like a bear trap closed around her ankle. Looking down she saw a very angry Vladek, the flesh hanging from his face, but already healing.

“I’ve had just about enough of you, beast,” he snarled.

“No!” Emily roared as she wrenched her ankle from his grasp.

She had to end this now.

And for a moment—a brief and horrible moment—she let the wolf take over, trusting its instincts to do what had to be done.

It was like watching a movie from the back of a theater. The wolf went wild with its sudden freedom. It dug
its claws into the flesh of the goddess and scaled her like a cat going up the side of a curtain. No matter how hard A’Ranka flailed, or how loudly she screamed, the wolf held tight, determined to reach its—
her
—objective.

A’Ranka slithered around the chamber, whipping her body from side to side, trying to dislodge her attacker. She was holding the vampire’s heart aloft, as if that would somehow protect it, but in a fit of panic, the goddess brought her arm down to swat away her assailant and the wolf leaped upon the opportunity.

It bit down upon the goddess’s wrist with all the power of its jaws, its mouth suddenly filled with the disgusting taste of the snake deity’s ancient blood.

And then the wolf was flying, soaring through the air as A’Ranka at last succeeded in dislodging her attacker.

But the wolf had succeeded as well.

Emily forced the wolf back, regaining her will. She opened the wolf’s jaws, dropping the hand of the goddess, still clutching Vladek’s beating heart, into her grasp.

The chamber was filled with the screams of a goddess in pain. The vampires were in a panic, A’Ranka’s cries and savage flailing scattering them about the chamber like toys thrown around by a pissed-off child.

But Vladek did not have such problems. He was coming for Emily. The vampire roared as he surged toward where she knelt, still more beast than anything else, but she stopped him dead in his tracks.

“You dare,” he growled, his body shaking.

Emily held the beating vampire heart, showing it to him … showing the vampire that she held his life in the palm of her clawed hand.

The wolf slowly nodded its shaggy head. “I do,” she said.

Vladek lunged, a last-ditch crazy effort to win, but the wolf was back in control, and it had been quite a while since it had last eaten.

It shoved the black and beating organ into its mouth and hungrily began to chew.

Vladek knew that this was his end.

He had come so close to fulfilling the dreams of his people.

So close
.

In his mind he imagined what victory would have felt like: destroying the wolf, filling his body with her animal blood. It would have given him the strength he needed to
vanquish the remainder of his enemies. One by one he would have dispatched them, feeling the eyes of his adoring subjects and goddess upon him.

And when that was done, when there was no one else to challenge him, he would have told his goddess … his beloved A’Ranka, that it was time to change the world, and she would have agreed.

Using the power given by her worshippers she would have gathered her strength, and commanding the dusty remains of all that had once lived and died, she would have done what Vladek asked of her.

The sun would shine no more, swaddled in a thick shroud of deathly remains. The vampires would have emerged from the temple, crawling out into the jungle, ready to claim the world as their own.

It would have been glorious
, Vladek thought.

If only the werewolf hadn’t eaten his heart.

And that was his final thought.

Before he was turned to dust.

THE GODDESS ROARED
.

How dare they
, she thought, slithering across the stone floor to retrieve the hand that had been bitten from her wrist.

The angry deity snatched it up from the ground, reat-taching it to her wrist. She then flexed the long fingers adorned with fabulous rings of gold and, satisfied that she was again complete and splendid, she turned to those responsible.

“You have no idea of the immensity of the power you have angered,” she declared. Again, she stirred the dust within the chamber.

A’Ranka could already sense the coming darkness outside the chamber, and if she closed her eyes she could even
see it, the clouds of dust lifting up from the surface of the planet and floating into the sky. There were more dead upon this world than had ever been alive, and by her command they would blanket the world and never allow the touch of the sun again.

“No, I think I have a pretty good idea,” the young human, whom she sensed was much more than that, said as he approached.

“Then you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that you … all of you,” the goddess said, glaring at the four members of the Brimstone Network, “are about to face my wrath.”

A’Ranka paused, bringing her recently reattached hand to her chin. “Or, you could pledge allegiance to me and I will consider allowing you to live in the kingdom that will be forged in my resplendence.”

The remaining vampires had encircled her, protecting her.
How cute
, she thought, as if she had anything to fear from this rabble.

She noticed that the human was holding something in his hand, a scroll of some kind, and in the other he held a dagger.

A’Ranka laughed, allowing the dusty dead to swarm around her head like a flock of angry birds. “Is that how
you are going to defeat me?” she asked the man-child. “With your scroll and dagger?”

He looked at the objects before returning his gaze to her. “If need be.”

She did not care for this one; there was an arrogance about him that made her quite angry. The goddess lashed out with her tail, hoping to shatter his bones. But her tail passed through his form as if he weren’t really there.

She had been right about him. He was special.

“I want to give you a chance,” the youth had the audacity to say to her. “I want to give you the opportunity to go back where you came from, the place where you were sleeping.”

She smiled, showing off her beautiful, razor-sharp teeth. “Now why would I do that?” she asked, confident in her supremacy.

“Because the alternative is much more unpleasant,” the youth replied.

“Alternative?” the dust goddess questioned, rearing back upon her serpentine form. “I’ll crush your alternative and make it beg for mercy.”

Her words were meant to instill fear in the man child, but instead, all she got was acceptance.

“I figured you’d respond that way,” he said, and he dropped to his knees before her, not in worship to her glory.

But to slowly unfurl the scroll.

Bram knew that it would go this way, but he had hoped for something else. His father had always told him that the forces of the supernatural were stubborn, and would often go about things in the most difficult and unpleasant ways, and once again his father had been proven right.

He had gotten the idea about the scroll on one of his recent, restless nights. When the other members of his team were fast asleep, Bram could do nothing but think about the future, and what his failure might mean, not only to his friends, but to the world.

Bram had become overly concerned with the fact that they could be fighting a goddess. How could they possibly go up against something so powerful?

It was then that he realized that only a god could defeat a god.

That he had to fight fire with fire.

The Archivist had helped him find this scroll—a scroll
of summoning. It had been uncovered in the ruins of an ancient Yad’Zeen city and hidden away by the Brimstone Network. With this scroll and the proper royal lineage, the ancient beings of Yad’Zeen worship could be summoned.

Bram had originally believed his plan would fail due to the missing component of royal lineage, but he was reminded by the Archivist of his history as the son of a princess of Specter.

Kneeling before the unrolled document, written in a language older than recorded history, he began to read, grateful that his father had insisted that he master the forgotten tongues.

“What are you doing?” A’Ranka screamed, slithering toward him with great speed.

Bram ghosted, and the dust goddess passed through him as he continued to read the ancient ritual aloud.

She was coming at him again, her vampire servants scrambling to keep from being trampled by her frantic movements.

He had reached the end of the invocation, and was ready for the final step, hoping his blood royal enough to finish the task. He could feel A’Ranka bearing down on him as he again willed himself solid, and he dragged the
ritualistic blade across the palm of his hand, spilling five drops of blood upon the bottom of the scroll.

His offering of blood … payment to communicate with the gods.

Nothing happened, but in his disappointment, Bram allowed his guard to drop and he was struck savagely from behind by the death goddess. He soared across the chamber, hitting a stone pillar and rolling to the ground. Stitch, Bogey, and Emily—no longer in her wolf shape and clothed in robes that he’d last seen worn by Gideon—ran to his aid.

“Are you all right?” Stitch asked, kneeling beside him, squeezing his limbs, searching for broken bones.

“I’m fine,” Bram said, brushing his friend away. “Not that it really matters now.”

They all looked to the center of the chamber to see the smiling form of A’Ranka as she gathered her strength around her. Fingers of energy leaped from her hands, striking her vampire followers, draining them of their life-force and turning them to dust.

And with each death, her power seemed to grow.

“So what now?” Bogey asked. “I could rift us an opening someplace and—”

“No,” Bram said. “Give it a minute.”

He hoped that he was right, that it was just taking a little bit of extra time for the Yad’Zeen deity to answer the call.

Maybe he was in the bathroom
. The uncharacteristically humorous thought jumped into his mind, and at the moment he was convinced that he was spending way too much time with Bogey.

A’Ranka was laughing again, a hearty laugh that said she didn’t have a care in the world.

Bram was just about to tell Bogey to open an escape rift, when it seemed as though the world suddenly exploded. At first he thought it was A’Ranka’s doing, but as he gazed through the whirling dust and dirt, he could see that she appeared just as surprised as everybody else.

The pyramid above them had been torn away, hundreds of feet of dirt and rock ripped up to expose a sky made twilight by the swarming of ashen remains of the dead.

But there came a blinding light, as if the sun had fallen from the sky to attack the shroud that tried to blanket its magnificence.

Bram and the others could only stare in awe at the sight that now appeared above them: Borphagal, the Yad’Zeen
god of life, and former lover to A’Ranka. He held the crumbling pyramid in one gigantic fiery hand and peered down into the enormous hole.

“I think I just peed my pants,” Bram heard Bogey say, and understood exactly how the Mauthe Dhoog was feeling.

The god’s eyes were like two bottomless pits of liquid darkness, but somehow Bram knew that they were looking at him.

“Who has called me from my slumber?” Borphagal asked in a voice that Bram imagined sounded very much like the Big Bang, when the universe was formed.

He tried to answer, screaming up at the god whose hair resembled long licks of flame undulating about his moon-shaped head, but he doubted that the Yad’Zeen life-god could hear him.

At that point, it didn’t matter.

For A’Ranka attacked.

Desperate to remain free, the dust goddess summoned all her power to defeat the deity that had originally imprisoned her. From the remains of the dead collected in the soil of the earth and in the very atmosphere, she used her dark magick to shape a man of dust—a construct to combat her most hated foe.

The dust warrior appeared before Borphagal, attacking before the sun god could even react, covering his glowing body like a blanket.

“Yes,” A’Ranka hissed, gazing up at the gigantic cloud of black that had swallowed the god of the sun.

“This isn’t good,” Bram yelled over the deafening sound of struggle.

“I agree,” Stitch answered.

“I think a distraction is in order,” Bram said, marching across the chamber floor.

“What kind of distraction?” Emily asked as she, Bogey, and Stitch began to follow.

Bram stopped before A’Ranka. The goddess was still gazing up at the struggle, her concentration devoted to controlling her servant of dust.

“Use your imagination,” Bram said, his body suddenly going pale as he drifted up from the ground and propelled himself toward the distracted goddess.

A’Ranka’s gaze suddenly fell upon him and he watched her large, black eyes begin to seethe.

“You!” she bellowed in a voice like the wail of a hurricane.

“I gave you a chance to quit,” Bram said, propelling
himself toward the goddess’s face. “But you decided to do it the hard way.”

His ghostly form passed through the dust deity’s face. He allowed his body to grow slightly solid and then ghostly again before exiting the back of her head.

The goddess screamed in pain.

Floating behind the flailing goddess he saw that his team was doing just as he told them, each attacking A’Ranka in their own unique way: Emily had changed to her wolf form again, biting and scratching at the deity’s reptilian body; Stitch was using his superhuman strength to hurl huge hunks of stone; and Bogey was rifting small passages that allowed clouds of nasty biting insects to swarm around the goddess’s face, stinging her flesh.