Faith Hunter - Host

Crawling through the slime were things, four feet long and bulbous. I had never seen them before but I knew what they were. The smell alone told me. Succubus larvae. Lots of them. I regripped the bloodied weapons, ready for another attack, but the white-bodied pupae with strange, jointed bodies and blunt, black snouts didn’t attack.

The Dragon threw me. I crashed against a wall, cracking my elbow, grinding my ribs. I lost my blade. The femur bone cracked the wall beside me, thrown by the beast. I slithered through gunk collected at the base of the wall. It was a long moment before the haze of pain thinned and I was able to breathe.

I looked around, trying to orient myself. I was at the front entry of the destroyed church; with mage-sight, the sanctuary was alive with Darkness, larvae everywhere, but no Azazel.

Fear crawled around in my chest on its little spider legs, a feeling I was coming to hate. Above me, the shields snapped back in place, overlapping bubbles of power. The awful smells vanished. Poof. I remembered the overlapping conjures I had seen from the air, looking down on the church. Reality had changed while I was in the river of time. I had been gone longer than I thought. How long? And where was the beast?

In mage-sight, I spotted the glowing energies of the tanto and retrieved the blade, wiping slippery gunk off it and off my hands, gooing up the edge of my cloak. Having the blade made me feel immeasurably better. I sheathed the tanto and gripped my side gently, supporting the loose and grinding ribs.

“Thorn?”

A distinct mind opened to me, clinging, thoughts that smelled of roses in spring and the salt smell of the sea. “Rose?” I whispered, holding my side.

“Help. Help me!” she called, her mental voice a weak echo full of static and dark energies, as if she were far away. Her mind was a well of panic, fear like a storm blowing through it, lightning spiking. I couldn’t place her direction. I ripped at my amulets and held the Apache Tear away from me. I found the remembered mind. Close by. Very close. “Thorn!”

She was alive. “Rose!” I screamed, the sound croaking as agony speared me.

I turned, searching for her. Though I couldn’t smell it, I spotted the succubus queen. It was sitting on a pile of rock and brick, staring down at me, protected from me, separated from me by black motes of energy in a small circle of power, hiding behind a shield. The queen was once again in its human form, not Gramma, but the form of Jane Hilton, Lucas’ lady love, blond and green-eyed, so utterly beautiful she—no, it—should have been a seraph. It stared at me, hunger in its eyes, its hands on a body supine beside it.

“Thorn…” My thoughts were sucked beneath a wave of Rose’s pain. Unthinking, I dropped the Tear. Rose’s mind closed to me.

Blood coated the queen’s perfect jaw. Mage-blood. Rose’s blood. Jane licked its lips and bowed its head, its tongue flicking. It was drinking her blood.

Rage roared up. I pulled a throwing blade and stabbed the shield. Black sparks flew, but it was like hitting a diamond. My blade slid off. I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get to Rose. I sobbed, my broken ribs grinding. Throwing back my head, I screamed in rage, the shattered edges of my ribs stabbing together in torment, the agony slicing. Pain brought me back and dropped me breathless to my knees in the slime. Some still-sane part of me found and pressed the Apache Tear against my neck. Calm settled on me, and I took two shallow breaths, fumbling with the amulets in my necklace, searching for a weapon to get me through the shield.

I shoved an anticonjure amulet against the shield-wall, holding it against the energies. The scorched smell of burned leather rose from my gloves. The scent cleared the last of Rose’s panic from me. Resting in the icy slime, I pressed the Tear close as shame threaded through me.

Rose’s head rotated to me and her eyes met mine. Horror and panic were mirrored there, and her body quivered in minute waves of terror. Tears flowed through the grime on my twin’s face. “Thorn,” she mouthed at me, her words silenced behind the shield that was more than protection, stopping air flow and sound as well. I was a coward, but I couldn’t put away the Apache Tear again. I couldn’t bear Rose’s fear inside me. The succubus had her mouth at my twin’s neck, sucking. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Flames blinked into sight over me, dropping over my head, spinning in a fiery circle, stealing my night vision. They hissed words as they raced around me, plasma trails in the night. “Omega maggge,” they said. “Foretold one. Omega maggge.”

I crawled to my feet and stepped away from them, focusing on Rose. “If I’m so great a mage, then why can’t I conjure me some help?” I whispered, my feet slick on the snail trails.

A brilliant light snapped into space overhead, bathing the church in a dazzling radiance. The concussive movement of air from its arrival slammed against the shield and should have thrown me to my knees, but the Dark energies protected me. There was only one thing I knew that displaced that much air on arrival. A wheels. No way had there been time for it to answer my plea. Someone else had brought it here. Not good.

The Flames swirled in a climbing spiral, toward the wheels overhead. A shaft of light pierced the shield above me and the Flames swept through. The lights went out, the world going black, though there was no massive boom. I waited a beat, but the Flames didn’t return.

Feeling unaccountably betrayed, I drew the kris and the tanto, holding them ready. Stepping in a circle, I placed my feet carefully in the slime, trying to isolate various noises: my footsteps, rustling, a soughing that might be a distant wind. To compensate for my ruined night vision, I opened both mage-sight and a mind-skim. When I caught my balance and the resulting nausea settled, I looked around. The church glowed weirdly in the blended scan.

Out of the night, a voice groaned, saying, “Crap. That hurts.”

I closed my eyes as joy blossomed in me. I inhaled to call him and pain thrust deep, broken ribs stealing my breath, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t alone. Eli was just beyond a pile of rubble.

L ouder, Eli shouted, “What? No ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? Just drop me ten feet into a slime pit and take off? What’s the matter with you, you big ugly feathered fiend! You trying to kill us?”

“That’s a cherub, you young pup,” another voice said, creaky and strained. “We just got picked up and dumped in the church. Shut your yapper or it’ll blow us to electrons.”

For a moment, I couldn’t place the voice, but I remembered Ernest Waldroup, the senior elder from Atlanta.

“Tears of Taharial, that hurts,” Thadd swore. “I broke a freaking wing.”

“What is this, old home week?” Rupert asked. “Audric?”

“Here. What happened?”

“Patience, brothers,” Shamus said. “When we rushed inside the sigil to take Thorn from the seraph, the wheels descended. And they took us up.”

“Like Elijah,” Jasper said, awe in his voice. “‘Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire,’” he said, quoting from the second book of Kings, “‘and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.’”

“We didn’t go very far for this to be heaven,” Rupert said.

“And if this is heaven, we got to talk to the cleaning crew,” Eli said. “Room fresheners, a little dusting, and a good vacuuming would do wonders.”

I couldn’t help my smile. I think if I were dying, Eli could make me smile. Come to think of it…I set the death thoughts aside. “How many of you are there?” I asked, my voice scratchy.