bedeviled & beyond 07 - beset & bewildered (21 page)

I doubted that. She could only know the parts of me that I was already aware of. I was growing in my powers every day. I hadn’t found the outer limits of my magic yet. So there were things she couldn’t have read it in my mind. I’d just have to make some discoveries of my own. “Tell me why we’re here.”

Morta opened her arms and glanced around. “Over the centuries, this place has called to me...this dimension. Its inhabitants are so deliciously violent. They have created such powerful and angry death magic.” She gave me a little pout that was just too creepy to stand. I grimaced. “It’s a necromancer’s smorgasbord. Unfortunately, until you came to me it was out of my reach.”

I really didn’t like the sound of that. “What do I have to do with it?”

Morta laughed. “Why, my lovely, you brought me here of course. And you gave me something else, something I never thought I’d have.”

I crossed my arms, glaring at her. I refused to ask.

Finally Morta shifted closer, trailing a long, bony finger along my jaw. I flinched away. “I’ve always wanted an apprentice.”

My eyes went wide. “Oh hell no!”

“Oh hell yes!” Morta laughed. “You are perfect. You have no idea what you’re capable of. Between us we can raze this pathetic dimension, consuming every bit of its death energy and then making our own.” She closed her eyes, looking positively orgasmic. “The fear we can create...it makes me dizzy with pleasure.” Morta lowered her head and encircled my throat with her hand. “Fear tastes so delicious, my lovely.” Quick as a snake a long, black tongue snapped out from between her lips and slid along my cheek.

“Eeewww!” I shrieked, jumping away.

Morta’s laughter filled the cemetery. “We’ll have so much fun together, you and I.”

Static filled my head and I tensed, readying myself for debilitating pain.

Darma?

Agony shifted through my mind and fell away. I breathed a sigh of relief but didn’t quite relax. The pain could still come. Despite that, I would gladly risk it to know that Astra and Slayer were all right.
Where are you?

In the forest. Where are you?

On the human plane.
I hesitated, almost afraid to ask.
Is Slayer...

He’s here with us. He said everything went black and then you were gone. He’ll be happy to hear you’re all right.

I knew how he felt.
For now. We need to give this whackjob a serious smackdown, Astra. Morta wants me to be her apprentice.

Silence throbbed through our mental connection and then Astra laughed.
Frunk m...

Agony shattered my head. I covered my ears and screamed as I fell to my knees. The feeling of blades slicing through my brain didn’t lessen as I curled into a fetal position and screamed until I had no breath left to scream.

The pain finally eased as footsteps swished across the grass toward me. Morta nudged me with her toe. “You will not communicate with your sister. From here on out you will communicate only with me.”

I forced my eyes open, sitting up as blood ran from my ears. “
You
did that to me?”

“I have been watching you for some time, my lovely. You should be honored to have been handpicked by one such as me.” Morta cocked her head. “Your sister is also a strong necromancer. I considered her of course, but she doesn’t have the discipline that you do. And her magic is much too light.”

I couldn’t help it, I had to snort out a laugh at that one. “Astra’s too light?” Warm blood ran from my nose and I scraped the back of my hand over it. “That’s a good one.” Then I realized what her statement was actually saying about me and I frowned.

High overhead, a silver arrow of light flashed across the sky. A shooting star. The wondrous sight brought me back to the problem at hand. “Look, Morta, I’m not going to be your apprentice, and I can’t let you stay here on Earth and torture the humans. So how are we going to do this? Do you want to flip a coin? Rock, paper scissors?” I grinned. “Maybe a bracing match of arm wrestling?”

Morta eyed me like I’d lost my mind. I think maybe I had. Everything I’d been dealing with over the past several days was starting to get to me. It was making me reckless and flip. Suddenly I didn’t care. I lifted a hand and slammed Morta in the chest with a wide ribbon of pure, black energy. She disappeared in a cloud of charcoal dust and I stood there, shocked. Surely I hadn’t...

Cold, bony fingers wrapped around my throat from behind and started to squeeze. The skin against mine was slimy and smelled of rot. I grabbed for my power and tried to pull it forward, only to find it blocked again, as it had been in Morta’s castle.

The air around me was suddenly frigid. The grass beneath my feet was covered in frost. The flowers on a nearby grave turned opaque from the cold and wilted before my very eyes.

The ghosts that had risen upon Morta’s arrival turned as one, stalking toward me like male and female shaped clouds with empty eyes. Lips spread wide in a death scream, they came together into a single, horrifying mass and moved in my direction. A few stretched bony claws in front of them, clearly intending to use them against me.

Panic trickled ice down my spine.

Morta lifted me off the ground and I frantically kicked out, my legs wildly flailing on the frosty air. Knowing my puny kicks wouldn’t so much as bruise her, I was operating in sheer, mindless panic mode. Clutching the slimy hands at my throat, I struggled to pull air into my lungs. It was no use. Morta had me in a death grip and she wasn’t letting go unless she wanted to. I had only one option.

I would need to step outside my comfort zone. Waaaaaayyy outside.

I forced myself to stop fighting and closed my eyes. Fighting to keep my thoughts on what I needed to do, I pushed panic and agony aside and let myself open to the energy swirling all around me. The first touch of that power was so oily I barely kept from recoiling, shutting down. The cold, black stuff oozed into me, leaching into my cells and dripping along my nerve endings. I shuddered, hard, and let the magic expand into my core. It hit the silvery light I’d nurtured there and exploded, sending a sensation like shards of glass ripping through me.

Morta released my neck and I fell to the ice-coated grass, rolling to my back and greedily sucking air.

The necromancer stood over me, her robes spinning on a magic-induced wind. The mask of cold beauty was long gone, and in its place was the rotting corpse that was the truth of the creature’s existence. I realized that even her demonic form had been a lie. In the moldering mask of her true face, Morta’s gaze was empty, filled with the barrenness of her intrinsic makeup. Death. Desolation. The termination of everything.

I told myself as I nurtured that horrible magic in my breast, that I’d make sure she finally met the end she so richly deserved. Despite the fact that I had no idea if I’d be able to pull it off.

I rose to my feet.

Morta watched me stand, the dead eyes widening as she looked me in the eye. I saw the moment she realized her mistake. She’d brought a dull blade to a sword fight and given it the means to sharpen its edge. Behind Morta stood an army of ghouls I hadn’t seen arrive. The hoods on their flowing robes hid their ugly faces, but the moonlight turned the bones of their skeletal hands the color of new snow. Their scythes caught the glow of the moon and sent it back out in silvery sparks of light.

In that moment I knew I was toast. Even if I could fight off the queen of death, I’d still have her armies to contend with. A sizzling touch brushed across the nape of my neck. I turned my head to the side and, eyes widening in shock, realized I had an army of my own. All of the spirits in the cemetery had lined up behind me, their dead eyes a hostile imprint on the frosty air.

I had one more chance to take the necromancer down and I was going to take it. Sucking air into my lungs, I flexed my fingertips. “Okay, ghosts. Let’s do this thing.” 

I knew I wouldn’t have time to consume the energy the dead were offering me the usual way. By the time I reached out and started sucking it in, Morta and her skeletal goons would be on me and it would all be over but the fat demon’s singing.

So I made a sudden decision and went with it. I spun on my heel and threw up my hands, flinging everything I had into the army of spirits filling the cemetery for as far as the eye could see. With a scream of sheer determination, I wrapped my energy around them and yanked, dragging them forward. My magic called to theirs, creating a high-pitched wail of sizzling power that arced from the first dozen spirits in the pack and then, as they fell, dissolving back into the ground, from the next dozen, and so on. Their energy felt clean, not evil, but it was infused with the bitter chill of the afterlife.

By the time I’d consumed several dozen of the dead, I felt like a block of ice and my teeth were clacking together. I would have dropped to my knees under the onslaught but my limbs were frozen. My legs wouldn’t bend. My heartbeat grew sluggish in my chest, and my outstretched arms and hands were blue with the cold.

I’d thought Morta and her goons would be the end of me. But I was starting to consider that I’d kill myself by consuming too much death energy. 

The first scythe plunged into my back, flinging me forward under the brute force. I didn’t feel the blade slicing through me. Though I knew it was gonna hurt like hell, later. At the moment I was numb, my body twisting and jerking under the bombardment of an impossible amount of energy.

The trees started to sway around us. Flinging leaves and small limbs to the ground with supernatural violence. A branch the circumference of my arm hit me on the shoulder with enough force to throw me to the ground. But I only jerked under its assault and it exploded into dust.

That was when I realized how much energy I was channeling. My aura had spread until it cast a glow a hundred yards from where I stood. The tombstones all around me were bathed in a soft blue light. The sky above me roiled with charcoal colored clouds, lightning spearing through them as my energy reached upward.

Morta screamed, the sound horrific in the chaos of the night. The spirits still standing before me began to twist away, their dead eyes wide with fear as Morta dragged them unwillingly to her.

I slowly turned to face the necromancer, my eyes throbbing in my head as energy swelled beneath my skin. I lifted my hands and looked at my fingers, in awe of what I’d created. Power sizzled above my skin. Not just in my palms, but over my entire body.

I realized then that the ground was much farther away than it had been. My body had literally grown to accommodate the new magic. I lifted my gaze to Morta and found her standing as I was, her eyes wide and her hands outstretched. A similar energy bubbled over the surface of her skin and blue-black sparks spat from her eyes.

She stared at me for a long moment and then smiled, her jagged rows of teeth blue in the cast-off light from her magic. When she spoke, her voice boomed above the cacophony, rumbled through the ground. “I see I’ve chosen my apprentice well. But it appears you’ll need to learn humility before you’ll be ready to serve.”

I shook my head. “It’s doubtful I’ll live that long. But then,” I told her with a smile, “...neither will you.” I closed my eyes and threw my arm above my head, releasing every bit of energy bubbling beneath my skin. It left my body with a boom that turned the ground beneath us into a roller coaster, waves of dirt and grass bucking beneath my feet.

Trees fell around us. Tombstones toppled, and ghouls screamed as the earth split open and dragged them under where they belonged.

Morta stood where she’d been when I’d begun bombarding her with my magic. Her hands were up and she’d formed a wall of her own energy to combat mine. At first glance, she appeared to be relaxed, barely straining to hold me back. But I used my magic to focus in on her face and saw the strain there.

Holding me off was taking a toll.

I gritted my teeth and forced more energy into the wave I was pelting her with. She stumbled back a step and I screamed with joy. “Die bitch!”

Morta looked even worse than the last time she’d exposed her demonic form. The stretched, dry skin was torn, the bones of her face showing through in several spots where the flesh had fallen away. Her arms were almost completely fleshless, and her hair stood up in a brittle spray, sparse and yellow on her bony skull.

She was failing.

Pain sluiced through my legs and I blinked, looking down. I’d dropped to my knees without even realizing it. My arms suddenly felt too heavy to hold up. It took everything I had to keep them lifted. At the same time, Morta seemed to straighten. The magic spitting from her fingertips pounded me, like physical blows to my chest and I fell backward, my head smacking hard against a fallen tombstone.

My power faltered and the full force of Morta’s magic assailed me, like laser bullets slicing holes in my flesh. I was done. It was over.

I’d lost.

The air beside me shifted and a familiar scent washed over me. The pain in my chest stopped and the chaos drifted away, lost behind a bubble.

Hard hands touched my face, lifting me into warm arms that held me too tight. “Princess, what have you done to yourself?” Slayer’s sexy voice soothed over me, filling in all the hurt places and making me smile. He wasn’t really there. He couldn’t be. I was dreaming. But that was okay. I could think of better ways to die than with a dream of Slayer to ease my passing.

Hard hands rubbed my fingers. Painful heat flared over me, forcing the holes in my body to heal. I wanted to scream at the pain but I was so tired. So cold. I didn’t have anything left inside me to fight it.

Then the hard hands slipped away and I felt their loss as if someone ripped my heart right out of my chest. “No,” I murmured in my dream. “Come back.”

I need her
, an urgent voice said.

I frowned, trying to place the voice. Oh, yeah. Astra. “What up, sis?”

As you can see, she’s delirious
, my sexy Slayer said.
She’s in no condition...

She’ll have to be. I can’t do this alone.
A soft hand fell to my chest, over my heart.