Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (23 page)

CHAPTER

FORTY

T
he guards didn’t wait for my response, emptying their clips into Esther and the Vexl. The bullets impacted the giant hound, but instead of leaving wounds, they seemed to just seep into the creature’s hide. Esther went flat, flickering around the blows, laughing, paperlike jaw unhinged as she laughed.

The weapons clicked empty, and the guards went for fresh magazines.

While they reloaded, I focused through the peridot and stared at Esther, trying to pick out the working that had rendered her immune to gunfire. Her physical form was bound to the liminal, non-Euclidean power of the Deeps, making her form like that of the Gatekeepers, not truly of this world. The binding was complemented by a warding against the bullets themselves. The binding made her form flat and flexible, and the wards pushed her away from the bullets. Remove either element, and the working might be made void.

The guards raised their weapons to fire again, and Esther clenched her fists. The weapons folded and spindled in on themselves, crushing hands and faces as they went. Half of the guards fell, screaming, while the others merely dropped the ruined weapons to the floor.

Emboldened by their hostess’s chanting, Antoinette’s spirit allies leapt into the fore, coming at Esther and the giant Vexl all at once, high, low, and middle. Esther sliced at Agwe, and the Vexl slashed at Igbe and bit at Okayo. Carter ran up to join the fight, standing beside and behind Igbe, responding to the Vexl’s strikes, breaking its timing, slashing at its face and claws with his sword.

While they fought, I held my free hand out, visualizing as I tried to untie the knots of power that Esther had used to lock in the ward against bullets.

The working was slippery, resisting my will, squirming and bending away from my power. Very smart. The workings themselves took on the properties they were tied to, making her sorcerous knot all the harder to unravel.

So perhaps instead of untying the working, I could add something to it to achieve the same effect.

I grabbed the amethyst from my pocket and palmed it in my left hand, joining the other two.

Still holding the complex working in my mind, I drew upon the Deeps and added a layer to the working, shifting the ward from one that repulsed bullets and projectiles to being one that attracted them. A twist here, a pull there, tying my own thread of sorcery around Esther’s . . .

“Very clever, brother. Mother would be proud. But your time is up.”

The Vexl chomped down on Agwe’s form, which vaporized into formless smoke, then faded. While the rest of the world froze, the Vexl slashed through Carter’s guard, carving into his arm and chest, then slashed with its other forepaw to vaporize Okayo. Carter stumbled back. I aborted my working and fired a burst of power at the Vexl to halt its rampage. Esther plucked the blast out of the air, sucking it in like a noodle slurped up from a bowl of ramen.

Was there literally nothing I could do to stop her? Every piece of our defenses had been thwarted, even after banishing a creature that had made men’s minds turn on themselves with terror.

Rather than attacking directly, I drew power and manifested a block of Deeps around the Vexl’s legs, then crystalized it, trapping the creature in the solidified earth of its home.

The creature roared, and Esther, back in her normal form, reached down and knocked on the Deeps-forged earth, her ear attentive. Then she reached straight into the construct, hand stretching like she was retrieving something at the very bottom of a full bag, and pulled. The Deeps construct lost its shape, and spilled out onto the floor, dissipating.

“That’s strike two, brother. Do you have any tricks left, or are you ready to give up now?”

My mind raced for another option, a fresh approach that Esther wouldn’t be able to unravel so easily.

While I hesitated, Carter engaged the Vexl again, slicing and parrying with the talwar in his off hand. He was sweating, armor rent in several places. His movements were slow, pained. He wouldn’t last long. None of us would.

Antoinette tossed a hematite at Esther, which erupted into a writhing mass of cable-thick vines, entangling the Vexl’s legs.

“Run!” Antoinette shouted, moving for the door. Esther moved her hands, unraveling Antoinette’s working.

I followed Antoinette through the doors, along with the remaining guards—two carrying a wounded third, whose arm had been turned into a bloody pretzel within his ruined rifle.

The doors swung close behind us, and then steel gates slammed down, covering the carved wood.

“Fumigating foyer now,” Vittorio said on the PA.

“There are wounded guards in there!” I shouted to the walls, hoping he could hear me.

“I’m not letting that crazy bitch any farther into this house,” Vittorio said, his voice cold.

I heard another monstrous yowl from the front room, even through the gates.

The balcony rimmed the whole room, splitting and going back to two doors that led toward the servants’ wing and the waiting room. Another half-dozen guards lined this room, loaded for bear, their weapons leveled at the entrances.

Below us, the main double doors shook with the impact of a car collision. A moment later, they shook again.

We moved toward the back of the room, the guards taking the other side of the walkway. We got behind the guards. An older man with a shaved head and thick glasses ordered one of the guards to take the wounded man, leaving the other two to take positions. The wounded man was escorted down to the servants’ quarters.

It would be a wonder if there was time for medical attention.

Another metal-rending pound. The metal security gate had a huge dent, where the Vexl was making short work of the Gardener’s protections.

Think. What can we do that might actually work?

The pounding undermined my thought process quite effectively, as the Vexl carved a yard-long rent in the metal.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, my voice breaking.

“You were doing something to one of her enchantments, right?” Antoinette said. “It seemed like that was working.”

“She’s countered every move I make, seemingly without any more effort than you would take swatting a fly. She’s amassed too much power—I can’t fight her just drawing from my own strength.”

As if to drive home my point, the security gate crumbled beneath the Vexl. Guards fired into the gap, and a moment later, the rent widened, and the Vexl climbed through, quickly followed by Esther.

While she was momentarily separated from the Vexl, I shouted, “Pain!” and poured power through the peridot, targeting the beast. The creature flinched as if hit on the face, then roared, charging forward into the waiting guards, taking shotgun, automatic rifle, and grenade fire as it went. Wounds appeared on the creature, and a bud of hope bloomed in my heart once more. I hit the Vexl with another pain working, which slowed it while half of the guards reloaded. The commander fired grenade after grenade from a gigantic cousin to a revolver, and the monster gave ground.

Esther leapt back onto the Deeps hound, and at her touch, it straightened, seeming to grow larger, more confident.

Her touch gave it the edge, the protection. All I had to do was separate them long enough to finish the Vexl, and then I could focus on subverting Esther’s working.

But that would take time, time to be purchased at a high cost in human life.

CHAPTER

FORTY-ONE

F
irst, I shouted another pain incantation, focusing on the creature’s left legs at the joint. The creature shook, the legs curling up into its body by reflex. Then I shouted, “Push!” and focused the agate on Esther, sending a force working at her. But not from the front. I arced the wave of force from the side, pushing Esther off her perch. She landed on her side, rolling off.

“Kill it!” I shouted, lungs burning as I reached out to push Esther farther away from the Vexl. The room filled with the report of gunfire while I strained to match Esther’s will. She crawled back toward the Vexl, which writhed, wailing at the highest register of human hearing.

I called out once more, my Enochian invocation turning to a guttural yell as I strained to keep Esther from the Vexl. The guards’ guns tore the creature to pieces, and with a final, tiny cry, it collapsed.

Emboldened, the guards turned their guns on Esther. She went flat once more, waving in the bullet-punctuated air. Her arms lifted high, and she wailed in Enochian, “Crush!”

The weapons folded in on themselves, collapsing like metallic pretzels, breaking several more bones of guards not fast enough to respond or so dedicated to keeping up fire that their sense of self-preservation lagged far behind common sense.

“Enough!” Esther said, the weapons all gone silent.

Carter, his sword untouched by Esther’s working, launched forward with an extraordinary lunge.

Esther fluttered to the side like seaweed. Carter cut back at her, and the two of them danced for several moments, her movements barely evading his relentless assault. After the third strike, Carter dove forward to tackle my sister.

But again, she wavered out of the way, folding nearly flat. Carter tumbled over where she had been and tucked into a roll. Esther wafted back upright, bringing a flat hand up, her palm glowing dark with the Deeps.

Seeing my moment, I shouted another burst of power. Esther held her other hand out to catch my blast, but splitting her focus delayed her blast long enough that Carter dodged out of the way.

Three guards with machetes joined the melee, and once more, Esther became the bending bamboo in a storm.

And while they kept up the pressure, I resumed my earlier attempt. I drew the power, focused on Esther’s working, and started to thread in my own addition to ruin her seemingly-unbeatable protections.

Esther took off one guard’s head with a burst of power, then maneuvered to dodge a strike from a machete and let it carry through into another guard’s shoulder.

“More pressure!” Carter shouted, but I was committed, could not be distracted. These would be the last casualties if only I could . . .

Esther wafted into the air and settled on the upper railing. She faced me and said, “Very clever, brother. But once again, you come up short.” She ran her hands over my working as it tried to burrow into her protection, and pulled it off like a stray hair from an alley cat. Then she whipped the enchantment at one of the guards, just as the commanding officer lined up a shot, red dot showing on Esther’s forehead.

“Don’t!” I shouted, but it was too late. The gun’s report covered up my plea, and I could have sworn I saw the bullet bend in the air, wavering from its path to punch straight through one of the machete-wielding guards’ heads.

Esther grabbed the machete out of the guard’s hands and turned to Carter, pushing forward to get inside the range of his longer blade.

If I could not hinder Esther’s protections, then I would add to those of my allies. I drew power again, and went short of breath, as if stricken. Too much, too quickly, and far too much this week. Much more, and I’d be coughing up blood. I wheezed in a breath, and focused on Carter’s blade. Pouring power through the peridot, I aligned his blade exactly opposite to the signature of Esther’s protection, hoping to achieve the same effect without targeting my sister directly.

I lost my breath again, dropping to my knees. I pulled myself up over the rail to fix my eyes on Carter as he danced, evading Esther while cutting off her advances, moving with incredible grace considering his many injuries and having been running just as hard as anyone these last few days.

The other guards were barely of any help. They’d move in, and Esther would carve into their strikes, turning a blow against one of them into a parry against one of Carter’s strikes. Again, I realized how incomplete my training had been. All part of the design, the prophecy.

My lungs empty, eyes watering, I completed the working on Carter’s blade, then collapsed onto my side, lungs spasming.

The sounds of battle continued as I fought to pull air into my lungs, clawing for purchase, desperate for air to drink into my lungs so I could rise again, keep fighting, and do something, anything to end this fight.

Someone grabbed me and pulled me up to a seated position. Then a strap wrapped around my face, and a fresh blast of air inflated my lungs. Wakefulness surged through me like lightning. I shot up, bumping whoever was holding me. I turned and saw Antoinette holding some sort of respirator, which she’d affixed to my face.

Looking over the railing, I saw Esther in paper form, whirling and lofting around Carter’s cuts.

But upon closer examination, I saw two wounds on my sister that had not been there before—on her arm and across her ribs. Had the working succeeded, or had Esther retreated to the flattened form when the tide of the melee turned against her?

I started to reach out for more power, then cut myself off. I did not know how much the respirator would help.

Instead, I turned to Antoinette, lifted the respirator, and said, “The Gardener.”

She nodded, and I hoped that I’d conveyed all I needed to, without having to say,
Only the Gardener has sufficient power to defeat my sister at this juncture. We must fall back and force his hand.

Offering me her assistance, Antoinette and I retreated once more, descending the stairs that led to the waiting area, which had two more guards posted at the doors back to the Gardener’s sanctum.

“Let us through,” Antoinette said.

“No one is allowed in,” said one of the guards, a thickly-built woman with a Mexican accent.

“Fuck that,” Antoinette said. “Your boss needs to get into this fight, unless you feel like getting ripped apart like a co-ed in a slasher flick, which is what’s been happening to all of your colleagues.”

Not the simile I followed, but to each their own.

“Get your lily-white ass out here, now! Your people are getting slaughtered!” Antoinette yelled.

The guards’ eyes went wide, and they stepped aside as the doors flung open, revealing the Gardener, his suit mussed, sleeves rolled up. Dots of sweat speckled his brow, and his hair was slicked with effort. He’d never been anything but entirely composed, which had the effect of making his current appearance seem entirely slovenly.

“I am doing everything I can, child. I was not meant for this sort of conflict. But if my chosen are insufficient for the task, then I will take matters into my own hands.”

Behind him, Nate looked on, a welt rising on his face, his hair disheveled. What had happened behind those doors? He had a bandage on his arm, and there was a crucible on the table, a ritual knife beside it. Perhaps the Gardener and my family were not so different, each spilling blood for their own purposes, cultivating the success of their desires.

My stomach turned at the thought. But like it or not, the Gardener was likely our last line of defense against Esther and her apocalyptic ambitions.