Vesik 3 Winter's Demon (3 page)

Sam glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “There are a lot of idiots out there, Demon. I still think you’re all right for a corpse-loving zombie groper.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said as I gave her a small nod before turning my attention back to Hugh. “The Society of Flame was made up of commoners and Fae alike. I’ve run across mentions of them in some old books, but nothing recent. A few books even hinted the society knew more about the magics of our world than the Fae courts did.”

“Seems unlikely,” Sam said.

I shrugged.

The brake lights on Zola’s car lit up as we took another exit and started through downtown Alton. It was homey, with much the same charm as Saint Charles, though there were many more modern buildings invading the old city. A farmer’s market bustled on the street corner, white tents catching the sun in a brilliant contrast to the aged brick behind them.

“I want to stop there,” Sam said.

“If we’re still alive later, I’m game,” I said.

“You think it’s okay Dad’s riding with them?”

I nodded. “He wanted to. Hell, he hasn’t seen Zola in what, five years? Six? He sees us all the time.”

“Not all the time,” Sam said. I could hear the tinge of loss in her voice, some piece of her still struggling with her change. “And he lost Mom.”

“For now,” I said, watching Sam. She frowned slightly before all emotion left her face. I’d seen the look before. She was choking something back that she didn’t want me to see.

The town vanished. A sheer, white rock bluff rose up on our right, speckled with green brush and crowned by trees and power lines. The Mississippi River hurried past on our left.

The bluff drew away from the road a short while later and Zola began to pull off. The rocks curled back around and started for the road again. A dry inlet, filled by an asphalt parking lot and a small tourist kiosk, greeted us as we parked. Gray landscaping stones lined the base of the bluff before a small patch of grass.

Above it all, on the rocky face of the bluff, the painting of the Piasa Bird loomed. It was not frightening, but when Sam turned the car off and my foot found the earth, power spiked around me. My Sight flashed up by instinct alone. The explosion of electric blue ley lines was almost blinding. The tangled lines of power lead to a massive cavern to the left of the painting. I let my Sight fade and stared at the cliff painting. I have no idea why they call it a bird. It looked more like a griffin, almost, but adorned with red wings and covered with golden scales. Red eyes bored into me, framed in a disturbingly human face, crowned with a deadly pair of horns. A tail crossed from its back, over its front shoulders, and curved beneath its body, where it wove between its four limbs and their ferocious talons.

“Shit,” Sam said as she closed the door. “It’s a bit creepy. That thing’s real?”

“God, I hope not,” I said.

Sam glanced at me, then back to the painting. I saw a shiver run down her spine.

Dad stepped out of Zola’s car and moved the seat forward to let Edgar out. I blinked, surprised to see Edgar in the back seat.

The fairies grew, drawing swords and forming a triangle around our group.

“Something up?” I asked.

Foster shook his head. “This is not a safe area. Things that should not be walk the earth here.”

“Have something to do with that massive ball of power?” I said as I hitched my thumb toward the cavern entrance.

“Keep your Sight locked down, boy,” Zola said. “To look on a being like the Piasa Bird—”

Edgar cleared his throat. Zola stared him down.

“It would be unwise,” she said.

“And unlikely to prolong your sanity,” Edgar said.

Dad pulled his shotgun off the floorboard of the Chevy.

“You will not need that here,” Aideen said. She pulled her coif down and let it pool around her neck. The tips of her pointed ears poked out from beneath her platinum hair.

“Leave it, Dimitry,” Cara said. “It will do you no good in this place.”

He hesitated only a moment before easing the gun back to the floor and closing the door.

“Fine,” he said, biting off the word as he turned back to the group.

Edgar moved and gently turned Dad by his elbow. “Honestly, we need you to create an imbalance, a need for sympathy.”

“You have the tact of demons, Amon,” Cara said flatly.

“What?” Dad asked as he jerked his elbow away.

“Dimitry, stop,” Zola said. “Do not be angered by this. The fight that is coming, we need help. Philip has allied himself with powers you cannot imagine.”

He glanced at Sam, and then at me. “My kids, are they in danger?”

Zola let out a hollow laugh. “They are always in danger. This will help. Ah promise you.”

His eyes trailed back to Sam and he nodded once.

Edgar glanced at Cara and narrowed his eyes, ever so slightly, adjusted the bowler on his head, and started walking toward the cavern entrance.

The entrance loomed large. An enormous arch opened into the bluff wall, a thirty- by fifty-foot space, split in two by a wide, rough column of stone. More columns shone dimly from within the darkness, all wider at the ceiling, obscuring what lay beyond.

Loose rock, from pebbles to boulders, littered the ground, rolling and twisting unexpectedly in attempts to snap our ankles or worse. I slid and cursed, kicking a sharp rock deeper into the cavern. The hollow sound of its impact echoed around us.

Cara led, with Edgar at her side. A dull blue light floated above his left shoulder, illuminating the passage ahead. Zola and Dad followed. Sam and I stayed a few paces behind, flanked by Foster and Aideen.

We moved forward slowly, keeping our formation as best we could. Nothing moved in the dim blue light. I looked behind us and saw the bright sockets of the entrance were fading, leading daylight away and bringing shadows close enough to touch.

Dad cursed as something large shifted deeper in the cave. The sound of lightning and a thunder crack in the distance rumbled up from the darkness.

“I have a bad feeling about—” Sam started.

“Shut up,” I said, but I couldn’t completely restrain my smile.

Edgar whispered something, and I could have sworn it was “My brother.” My eyebrows drew down in thought as I wondered what he was talking about before something else caught my attention. A wall, slightly off to our right, shimmered and vanished. A flash of white, which emitted no luminescence, became Cassie, running forward to embrace Cara, and then Zola.

The fairy was armed to the teeth. Golden mail with intricate Celtic designs was draped over Cassie’s shoulders and wrapped around her torso and legs. Her armor gleamed in the bluish light, a sword sheathed on either leg, with another hilt sticking up between her gray wings.

“You are here,” she said to Zola with a hand on my master’s shoulder. Her voice was light and more musical than those of the other fairies.

“You are safe,” Zola said. I could hear the satisfaction in her voice, made even clearer as her accent deepened and her words came out quickly. “Ah’m sorry we did not come sooner.”

“Do not apologize,” Cassie said. “This is more important than any one of us. If Philip or Ezekiel claim the Blessing, the fight is done.”

“If that happens, the world is done,” Cara said.

“What of the Piasa Bird?” Edgar said, his gaze never leaving the cavern’s depths.

“It stirs, Amon,” Cassie said. “Since you arrived here I would call it restless.”

Edgar’s eyes focused on Dad for a moment and then returned to the darkness. “Enough delays,” he said as he took one step into the shadow.

The avian cry shattered my senses. The cry of an eagle, magnified a thousandfold, rattled the walls and sent everyone to their knees, hands over ears. Except for Edgar, who laughed and almost jogged forward as pebbles and rocks crashed to the earth around us.

“Don’t open your Sight,” Zola said through gritted teeth.

I nodded and struggled to my feet with Sam’s help. The ley lines battered my senses. I was drowning in their power, flying in it as I walked beneath a raging tsunami, torrents of power swirling and pushing and pulling.

“Christ,” I said, my left arm outstretched in a vain physical effort to fight off a metaphysical storm.

Foster put a hand on my shoulder. “This is far older than Christ, Damian. Older than any human religion.”

“I’ve never felt anything like this.”

Sam put her shoulder under me and pushed forward. Dad helped Zola through the invisible storm as we followed Edgar deeper and deeper. The path sloped down and narrowed further in before a sharp bend to the north. We turned the corner behind Edgar and stopped dead.

I stared, slack jawed, at the beautiful monster hidden inside.

Talons like the blackest obsidian gripped the floor near our feet. Towering twenty feet above them stood an eagle. Brilliant gold feathers glowed across its entirety, etched with black highlights running to a brilliant white ring of fine feathers at its neck. Silver feathers gleamed like broadswords at the tip of its wings.

The behemoth cocked its head to the side, the movement too fast to follow. It blinked and a chain of lightning erupted from its eyes, blackening and scarring the cavern above it. Its head cocked to the other side and it bent close to Dad, its left eye only a foot or two away, above a black beak large enough to swallow a small car. A storm swirled where the eye should have been.

“Where is the Blessing, Cassie?” Edgar said.

“Tell him,” Zola said without hesitation.

Cassie glanced at Cara, who gave her a smile and a small nod. “It is in Boonville.”

Edgar turned back to the Piasa Bird. “Guard the town. We’ll come in the hour of the sun. One of the Seals is upon us.”

“Seal?” I asked as quietly as I could. I almost hoped no one answered, because the only Seals I could think of were ancient things I’d only read about. Old stories made them out as barriers between our realm and a host of places you really didn’t want to go.

Zola shook her head slightly, and I took the hint. No more questions.

The bird regarded Edgar for a moment before shuffling to the side. It walked around us, keeping its eyes on Edgar as it moved to another passage I hadn’t noticed. The creature paused and shook out its feathers like a normal bird. It hunkered down for a brief moment, then launched itself out of a narrow opening in the top of the cavern without moving its wings. The thunderclap that followed shook the earth once more.

Edgar laughed and turned to the group. “Isn’t he magnificent?”

Zola rapped her cane on the ground and snarled. “You didn’t tell us we were sending Cassie to live with a Thunderbird!”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Z
ola, it’s okay. Thunderbirds have never acted against the Fae,” Cassie said, her hands out in a placating gesture.

“And if we had come to find you?” Zola asked. “If we had set foot here without Amon and the bird decided
we
were an imbalance?”

Cassie’s hands fell and she turned toward Edgar. “Would he destroy them?”

Edgar shrugged. “It is unlikely. The old Fae legends are much more severe than a living Thunderbird. There is far more evil in the world than there are things trying to destroy it.”

We all stared at Edgar. A shiver ran down my spine. For all his talk and disdain for all necromancers, he’d just said—out loud—we aren’t all evil.

Edgar laughed, pulled his bowler off, and bowed slightly. “Don’t take that the wrong way. You still irritate me to no end.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “Thought my world was ending there for a second.”

“Not yet,” Edgar said as he started back up through the cavern.

I scooted closer to Zola as Edgar became a shadow in front of the cavern entrance. “What the hell is going on with him?”

“He has hidden himself from the world for many years,” she said. “Not many people have been betrayed as badly as Amon. Those that violated his trust the worst were necromancers.”

“Betrayal leaves a mark,” Cassie said as she came up behind us, picking her way around the debris on the floor of the cavern. “Most of us were surprised when he joined the Watchers. He’d been all but a hermit before that.”

“So what’s the Thunderbird like?” Foster said to Cassie as he landed on my shoulder. I guess he’d decided the risk was over for the moment.

I caught Cassie’s frown as the sunlight temporarily blinded us.

“It is … different,” she said. “I understand it thrives on balance, but I don’t think it is always balance as we see it.”

“Gods rarely see things the same way we do,” Zola said.

“A god?” I slid on a patch of loose rocks as I contemplated what that could possibly mean. “Thunderbirds are Old Gods?”

“Shit,” Sam said. “You mean that thing is a god?”

“Oh yes,” Zola said.

“What’s an Old God?” Dad asked.

“Some things you are better off not knowing,” Zola said as she patted Sam’s arm.

“Bullshit.” Dad turned to face us in the entryway, somehow seeming to block the entire cavern entrance. “You let this man drag me down here as bait, bait for some kind of god that’s sensitive to the fact I just lost my fucking wife! You think there’re worse things I don’t need to know? Things I can’t deal with? I’ll tear this world in half to get her back!” His chest heaved and a vein throbbed at his temple.

Zola folded her hands gently over her cane and sighed. “Ah meant no disrespect Dimitry. Would you not do this to keep your children safe, to help find your wife?”

Dad narrowed his eyes.

“It seems our guest is early,” Zola said as she turned her head.

A gray phantom caught the corner of my eye. I jerked a little when the shadow waved and laughed a low rhythmic sound, almost a giggle. “Oh shit,” I said quietly.

“That’s my cue,” a voice said from the deeps of the cavern ceiling. A man dropped in a flash of blackened red flame. Stone powdered and billowed into thin clouds as he crushed it flat upon landing.

Sam blipped out of existence and pounced onto Mike the Demon, crushing him in a bear hug.

“You’re kind of ruining the dramatic entrance,” Mike said as he smiled and patted her back with a few good whacks.