Faith Hunter - Host

Two more booms took out other dragonets and a chunk of a nearby building. A group of EIH soldiers hacked a beast into little pieces, too small to regenerate. Another creature was wounded when Gloria and her husband, legs wide and braced against the earth’s shaking, walked it down the street, pumping rounds into its underbelly.

I saw a flash of the beast’s face, and I could have sworn it was surprised. Bullets had never worked on Darkness. Until now. Humans had always been excellent at devising means of death, and they had finally discovered how to kill evil with Dead Sea salt ammo. Ironic that humans, who had been taught the arts of war by Azazel, were now able to destroy its followers.

Beneath me, the earth continued to roll and shift. Along the street, buildings buckled, walls giving way. Stones and chunks of brick fell. The cloud lifted, riding the night sky.

EIH warriors raced up and down the street in el-cars, weapons booming. Elders rose to their knees and resumed praying. Human soldiers stood, wobbly, and checked their weapons. The tornado continued to roar, pulling light and life through the link. I gripped my prime ring and mouthed the words to mage in dire, but the sound died unborn. It was too late. I was too late. I should have called long before now. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Once more I crawled to my feet. Audric struggled upright on the unstable earth, his face hard as polished marble. He strode to Rupert’s side, knelt, lifted him in a fireman’s hold, and carried his partner to partial protection beneath the porch of Thorn’s Gems. Its three-foot-thick walls still stood, though a crack ran along the mortar from a foundation stone to the roof.

Audric eased Rupert to the snow and sat beside him, holding the smaller man like a child. Windows and doors brightened. Snow on the street was a scorched white pelt running between the buildings. The Darkness was withdrawing. The remaining few dragonets flew away, north. The funnel cloud thrashed and tightened. In a flash, it dipped down and touched the succubus. The scaled body crumbled to dust, the particles sucked up by the roaring wind.

As if wrenched through a hole in the air, the tornado disappeared through the link. Black wind followed and vanished. Misty remnants dispersed. Silence was so loud my ears ached with the emptiness of it. Above me, the stars and moon shone white and pure onto the blood-splashed snow and ice. Wood smoke billowed in the wake of the Dark Wind. The dark tornado.

My parents had been killed by a tornado. A tornado was one of the Dragon’s forms. Two vital facts. Crucially significant. That meant its plans had been in place for decades. But I was so tired it was hard to think it through logically, point by point. All I could think was that Lolo, who had raised me when my parents died, had perhaps been behind the whole thing.

A voice whispered up from the depths of my mind: Or a dupe, led astray?

Weariness ached through my shoulders and hips, pain throbbing up from lacerated, frostbitten feet. My soles had bled in the boots and stuck. I tore ruined flesh with each step. My fingers had gripped the hilts so long, they creaked when I opened my hands. Bodies lay in pools of blood. The cries of the injured resounded weakly in the vacuum of silence left by the wind. So many dead and wounded. And all for nothing. I couldn’t help the single sob that welled up in me and echoed quietly down the street.

I wanted to believe that the retrieval of its succubus queen and the loss of so many dragonets was the reason the Dragon disappeared, but the Darkness said it wanted a child of mine through Mole Man’s line. Even though trapped in a different reality, had it been aware I was married to Lucas, a Stanhope, a grandchild several times down the line from Mole Man, Benaiah Stanhope?

There was too much I didn’t know, but I knew this—the reason for its departure. It had plenty of blood, mine and Rupert’s, mage and Stanhope. Mixed. And Rose? Did it have her?

It was all starting to make a terrible kind of sense. After Forcas and the dragon killed my parents, it had waited for my blood, unable to sense me for ten years. Then, in a moment of jealous anger, I had accidentally damaged my prime amulet and it found me. It had learned I was here, within the reach of its minions, placed here by Lolo, as part of her Machiavellian plan to free Barak, her lover, trapped on the Trine. Lolo, my Lolo, had been part of the Dragon’s plan. Knowingly or unknowingly. I shuddered.

I hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out, not good enough, fast enough, or strong enough. And because of that, the Dragon had what it needed to break the chain and finish what it had started so long ago. The destruction of humanity, of the seraphs, of the heavens and the earth. If ignorance was bliss, I’d never be blissful again. Tears trickled down my cheeks, the salt stinging in cuts and burns. This was my fault.

T his town will not allow the heresy of the Earth Invasion Heretics to be spoken. We will remain pure, true to the Most High and his High Host,” Elder Perkins shouted, his brown robe quivering along his body, both hands fisted.

“You don’t speak for all the citizens of Mineral City,” the small Cherokee woman said. “I say the EIH have every right to be heard. I’m the widow of Joseph Barefoot, who gave his life to save this misbegotten town.”

“So you say,” Perkins said. “We’ve seen no proof of his death.”

“She saw him die.” She pointed a finger at me. “Ask the town mage.” It seemed the entire crowd sighed. So did I.

It was morning, after a night spent gathering the bodies of the fallen Darkness and burning them. A night putting out fires that still smoked. A night healing the wounded and finding makeshift homes for the dispossessed. A night spent in grief and what-might-have-beens. And guilt. And anger.

Cheran, his fancy suit in tatters, fought fires, devising incantations and making conjures to melt snow and to snuff flame. I needed to learn those, but I wasn’t speaking to the flashy mage. He was working hard now, but he hadn’t fought when Darkness attacked. Instead, he had hidden under a glamour, throwing knives from a distance, helping only when it was prudent. He had accused Audric of cowardice, and then had behaved like a coward himself. He hadn’t acknowledged me once since the conflict. He avoided Audric like the plagues. His shame was a harsh burden.

It was an hour after dawn, and most of the townsfolk were gathered in the Central Baptist Church, the building used for town meetings, and the rare worship service when the crowd was too large for the newer kirk building or when the kirk was under repair. Everyone was exhausted, frightened, irritable, and looking for someone to blame. I had a feeling it would be me.

The meeting was being shown on SNN live, because the reporter/cameraman—woman, rather—had found a way to rig up something through one of the few satellite phones in town. The broadcast wouldn’t be delayed until the satellite dish could be repaired, though devil-spawn had done a number on it. Mineral City and its third fight with Major Darkness this winter was breaking news. Lucky me.

“Thorn St. Croix, you are called to the dais,” Elder Waldroup intoned.

Maybe Romona Benson would film me only from the rear. Or not at all, and just focus on the crowd. Maybe pigs could dance and horses could play the tuba. Maybe I’d grow wings and fly out of here. I heaved another breath, stood, and walked to the front of the old church.

At least I had found time to shower and change clothes. I wasn’t speaking before the town splattered in blood, wearing pink jammies with hearts on them. I was in my clean black battle dobok and was fully armed. Had I been wearing the fighting uniform the night before, I wouldn’t have been so badly injured, as the cloth was treated by mage masters to be impervious to the acid and ichor of the Dark, resistant to fire, and hardened to the cutting of claw and fang. Instead, I’d fought barefoot. In the snow. How dumb was that?