Magic Binds (23 page)

I let it slice way too close for comfort, stepped in, and hammered a punch to her right ear.

She stumbled and somersaulted backward, putting a full thirty feet between us and landing in a half crouch.

She wore a skintight black catsuit. Black wrist guards and shin guards shielded her limbs, made of durable synthetic fabric, probably with steel or plastic inserts, hard enough to stop a blade and prevent a cut. Some band-like pattern over her torso. Soft black boots, almost slipper-like, a sole with some fabric to hold it to the foot. Swirls of gray camo decorated her skin. The cloak had hidden her hair, but now it was out in the open, so pale blond it was nearly white and pulled back into a short high ponytail. Thin long arms, thin long legs, long neck—room for a good cut if I could get close enough. Long legs were normally an asset for a woman, but not for her. Their length and shape put them past the point of attractive and straight into creepy. There was something deeply disturbing about her silhouette. Inhuman, almost alien. Adora had said there was one other fae among the sahanu. I'd bet my arm that she was standing in front of me, holding a foot-long Teflon-gray tactical knife.

“Sloppy, Irene.” I turned toward her and flicked imaginary blood from my sword. “Do better.”

She smiled, showing a mouth full of human-sized but sharp teeth, each pure white and pointed, like someone had studded her gums with thirty-two narrow canines.

I had a handful of iron powder in both pockets.

Not much exposed skin. If I used the powder, it would have to be on her face. Right now she didn't know I had it and once the element of surprise
was lost, thrown powder was easy enough to avoid. I had to use it when I had a sure shot.

“Today,” I told her. “I have things to do.”

She tossed her knife into her left hand and pulled out a short tactical sword. Same dark finish, same profile, almost a steak knife but with a sixteen-inch blade. There went my reach advantage.

Irene charged. I dodged the sword thrust and raised Sarrat to parry, but not fast enough. The knife caught my left biceps. The cut burned.

She jumped back, grinned, and raised the knife to her mouth. Her tongue licked the blood.

I pushed.

She screeched as the blood in her mouth turned into needles and pierced her tongue.

“Dumbass,” I told her.

She lunged at me, swinging, her blades flashes of movement. I dodged, blocking and waiting for an opening. Left, right, left—her blades rang, meeting Sarrat. Cut, cut, cut—she nicked my right forearm—right, left—searing pain, she cut my left shoulder again—cut, cut . . .

I had trouble keeping up. She was too damn fast. A person with arms that length had no business being that fast. I was blocking at the peak of my speed. A few more moments and I'd get tired enough to slow down.

Cut, cut . . .

Now. For half a second she was in front of me, left arm with the knife extended, right rising up for another slash. I sliced at her left wrist, stepped back, and got my left arm under her right, trapping it. I jerked her forward onto my blade.
You're dead.

She wasn't there. One second I had her locked in and the next she vanished.

A teleporter.

The knife sliced across my back. I whipped around and barked a power word.
“Aarh!” Stop.

The power word clamped her. Magic shot from her in a short concentrated burst, shattering my hold. She stabbed at my stomach and made it an inch in. I spun out of the way and kicked her.

She fell, then rolled to her feet, but I was already there, slicing. Sarrat's blade kissed the skin of her long neck, drawing a drop of scarlet. Her eyes darted to the right. She vanished.

Short-range teleporter, line of sight. I spun right and sprinted, darting back and forth, turning myself into a moving target. She'd have to chase if she wanted a shot.

Irene popped into existence in front of me and charged. I blocked her sword with mine. We clashed in the middle of the floor, metal screeching. I muscled her back. She vanished. Damn it.

I jogged right, zigzagging, moving in a rough circle. My stomach hurt. My left arm burned. I was breathing too fast.

She popped up on my right. I dropped to one knee, her long blade whistling over my head, and stabbed to the side. Sarrat nicked her thigh. She leapt back and vanished.

I kept moving, breathing a little faster than I had to, walking a little slower. I let the point of Sarrat droop a hair too low.

Come on in. I'm nice and tired.

A hint of movement sliding soundlessly in the gloom to my left.
Hello, Irene.
I spun to my right and dramatically sliced the empty air.
That's right, I'm scared and chasing ghosts. Enjoy the show.

I spun back, then front, the sword raised, and kept moving. I really was getting tired. This had to be it.

She trailed me, quiet, patient, a strange creature, shaped like a human but so far from it.

I stopped and took a deep breath, as if to steady my breathing.

She vanished.

The thrust came from the left. I spun away the moment I saw her disappear and she came into my spin, her teeth bared, eyes wide open, expecting easy prey.

I hurled a handful of iron in her face.

Irene screamed. I lunged and buried Sarrat in her stomach, sliding the blade between the reinforced plates of her suit. She screeched higher, her voice sharp. I twisted, ripping her insides, and threw the remaining powder into her gaping mouth. The scream ended, cut off by a choking gurgle.

Translucent wings snapped out of Irene's back. She leapt up, the wings beating in frenzy, sped all the way to the ceiling, then plummeted down, hitting the floor with a wet thud. Not enough power to truly fly, but she must've been a hell of a jumper.

Dark blood wet my blade, brown, almost rust-colored, as if the normal bright red of human blood was tinted with green.

Irene lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

I wanted to lie down, too. Instead I caught my breath and walked over to her. Rust-colored liquid poured from her mouth. She squirmed in a puddle of her own blood.

I raised my blade and finished it.

•   •   •

E
VERYTHING HURT.

My left arm hurt. My right arm hurt. My stomach hurt. I'd stopped to slap some bandages on the cuts. I could control the vampires of Mishmar, but if enough of them got together, enticed by my blood, they would be difficult to deal with and I was tired.

Nobody bothered me as I walked down the long hallway. If any other monsters skulked in the darkness, they must've decided I'd be too expensive to kill.

The last time, when we fought our way out of Mishmar, getting from my grandmother's tomb to the door took almost an hour, or it had felt like an hour. We fought the vampires, we moved slowly because I was at the end of my strength, and we had gotten lost at least twice. Now it took barely fifteen minutes.

In front of me the walls parted into an enormous cavern-like chamber, its ceiling lost in darkness, its floor shrouded in fog a hundred feet below. A narrow spire rose from the bottom of the chamber, fused together from concrete, stone, and brickwork. An identical but inverted spire reached down from the ceiling. They met in the middle, two hands clasping a rectangular stone box thirty-five feet high. A metal breezeway encircled it and a narrow metal bridge led to the breezeway from the stone ledge where I stood. Inside the room a magic storm howled, a power so ancient, so mad, that it made me shiver.

“Hello, Grandmother,” I whispered, and took the first step onto the bridge. It seemed longer than I remembered. I reached the breezeway and circled the room, my steps too loud on the metal, until I reached the doorway. It glowed with a pale purple light. I took a deep breath and walked inside.

A rectangular room lay in front of me. At the far wall a simple stone altar rose from a raised platform. Five stone steps led to it from the right. Between the altar and me lay my grandmother's body. Long sharp blades, opaque and white, grew from the massive, nine-foot-tall skeleton, some branching, some isolated, some in clusters. One of these blades was now on my back, attached to a hilt.

In life my grandmother was Semiramis, the Great Queen, the Shield of Assyria. In death, her body was no longer a human thing; instead, it had become a magic coral, neither fully bone nor metal, stretching upward and outward, blooming like a lethal chrysanthemum. It burned with the cold fire of magic.

I could still turn back. There was still a chance.

No, I'd come too far to stop now.

I approached the bones. The magic brushed against me light as a feather, and the potency it carried gripped my heart into a fist and squeezed all the blood out of it. The world turned black.

Breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe . . .

The magic let go. She recognized me.

I knelt, opened the bag, and gently laid the bones of my aunt by her mother's side.

A wail tore through the chamber. Magic slammed into me, throwing me across the room. I smashed into the wall, every bone in my body rattling.

Ow.

I blinked and saw the gossamer shape of my grandmother. She wore a thin red robe with glittering gold threads running down the length of it. A waterfall of black hair fell in soft curls down her back. She knelt by the bones, her face with its bronze skin and bottomless brown eyes twisted by grief.

I rolled to my feet and stumbled back to the bags. She let me approach.
I knelt by her, took out a thermos filled with Erra's blood, and poured it over the bones. They glowed weakly with pale red. I opened the second thermos and emptied it. The bones glowed brighter and dimmed.

Third thermos. A weak glow and then nothing.

It didn't work. I came all this way, did all those things, and it didn't work?

The tempest that was my grandmother stared at me, expecting something. I kept my gaze down. Looking into her eyes was like staring into an abyss. It would swallow you whole.

I had no more blood. Everything that the Pack had collected lay right there in front of me, like a fire laid out to burn. It needed an accelerant . . .

I pulled my sleeve back, peeled off the medical tape on my forearm, and squeezed some of my blood out. Why not? Everything else our family did was connected to blood. I let the hot red drops slide off my fingers onto the bones.

Nothing.

Work, damn you. Work!

My grandmother wailed. The magic slapped me and I rolled back across the chamber. My head swam.

I needed this to work. My son would die unless I did this.

I rolled to my hands and knees and crawled back to the body.

How could it not work? I was so sure . . . She was such a stubborn bitch, it should've worked.

The bones lay inert. My blood made no difference. I looked up at my grandmother. The awful gaze of Semiramis drained my soul.

“Help me.”

She kept looking at me. She had all this magic. The two of us were bathed in it and I knew that if she could have, she would've helped me.

I sat on the floor next to my aunt's remains. It was over. I was done. I'd tried my best and failed.

I'd failed Curran. I'd failed my unborn son. I'd failed the Pack, the Witch Oracle, the city, everyone in it. She was my last hope. Only two options were left now: become my father's tool like Erra did before me, or die fighting.

I would go back to Atlanta and I would fight. I would fight till my last breath, but I had already failed.

I looked at the specter of my grandmother, bent as if to cradle what was left of her daughter's body. How terrible must it have been for her? At some point my grandmother must've been young and Erra must've been a toddler. I could almost picture them walking together through the gardens my father was trying to resurrect. Idyllic and peaceful, just a young woman and her daughter in a place full of water and bright fishes and beautiful water flowers, before the war. Before my aunt turned into a monster. Before she watched all of her children grow up and die, killed by the curse of power and magic that was our blood. I had seen my son through the curtain of time. I didn't even know him and already I mourned him.

How in the world did it end like this, in an empty stone shell? This couldn't be what either of them had hoped for. They must've wanted love and family. They must've wanted happiness. Instead my grandmother died after seeing her daughter become a living plague, and my aunt was never happy. She destroyed and killed in impotent fury, and a part of her must've realized that she was trapped by her past and her blood, and so she raged harder and harder, but she could never break free. Even in this age, she awoke and hated being herself so much, she looked for a way to die again.

Tears wet my cheeks. I pulled Sarrat out of its sheath, hugged it the way I used to do with Slayer when I was a child, and cried. I cried for my grandmother, shackled in this concrete tomb so far from home. I cried for my aunt, because I finally understood her. I cried for myself, because I hated feeling helpless and I was so fucking tired of not being able to breathe, and now all my anger was leaking out of my eyes in tears. I cried and cried, my tears falling into the blood. I had nothing left.

Nobody would see it. Nobody would care. I could cry all I wanted and nobody could call me on it.

Finally, I had run out of energy. I wiped my eyes. Time to pick myself up and move on.

My aunt's bones glowed with ruby light.

I froze on my knees.

The loose bones of Erra's body shifted, twisting into a round pile. Blades
burst from it, stretching straight up and curving, pressed together into a bulb. The red glow flashed and turned bright. The bone blades curved and opened like the petals of a flower.

My aunt stood within the glow, clad in her blood armor. Sadness shadowed her translucent face, her dark hair falling down to her waist.

Oh dear God. It worked.

Her eyes snapped open. The Eater of Cities saw me. “You!”