Vesik 3 Winter's Demon (18 page)

Carter gave her a nod and vanished off to the left.

I could see the mansion in the distance now as we crossed through the thin line of trees by the old river gates. Gravel crunched, slightly muffled by accumulating snow.

“Stop,” Edgar hissed.

We drew up on the edge of the gravel drive and hunched down in the shadows.

“Ah can see them on the edge of the house,” Zola said. She pointed off to the right side, the east, closer to the cellar entrance.

“Gods, if they wake that thing …” Edgar whispered.

A shadow of motion caught my attention off to the left. I pointed toward the guest house and focused hard. Ley lines were bent, contorted and almost appeared as though they were being braided together. It was no natural pattern.

“You see that?” I asked.

Zola grunted. “Someone’s gathering power.”

“Be right back,” Foster said as he jumped out of Sam’s pocket and took to the air.

I wanted to yell out to him to get his ass back, but it would have given us away if we weren’t made already.

“Idiot,” Sam muttered as she shifted her feet and brushed against my arm with her own.

There was a dim flash near the edge of the guest house as Foster suddenly appeared in his full glory, dropping from the sky like a rock with a sword. I couldn’t hear anything, but the sudden release of ley line energy sent waves across every line I could see. Foster took a few quick steps around the building before he shrank and took flight again, landing on Sam’s shoulder a few seconds later.

“It’s bloody cold out here,” he grumbled as he nested in her pocket again.

“And?” I said.

“And what?” he asked.

“Who was over there?” Zola said.

“Some idiot blood mage. He has lots of blood to work with now.”

“I imagine so,” Zola said.

Sam’s hand jumped up to her mouth to stifle a giggle. Sometimes I worry about what’s happened to our sense of humor.

“Enough, let’s move,” Zola said.

We moved forward onto the drive, crossing the snow covered grass and then coming closer to the edge of the house before Zola glanced to her left and pulled up short.

“No, not here,” she said, and her voice trailed off to a whisper. “We’re so close. Give me your staff, Damian.” I did.

“What is it?” Edgar said as he too looked to the west. “Shit.”

“Run! All of you, run!” Zola said, her voice now a commanding shout.

I didn’t move at first as she started toward the man standing on the far side of the guest house. Such an average-looking form, arms crossed and legs spread in a nonchalant stance. The hint of a gold bracelet shone dimly in the night on each arm, half covered by the dark, fitted cloak he wore.

Zola turned and glared at me. “If you never listen to me again, listen to me now, boy. He is beyond you.”

I ran.

“Ezekiel!” Zola screamed as we left her behind. “Face me so it may be these hands that tear your wretched soul apart!”

I skidded to a stop near the edge of the mansion. Ezekiel. I couldn’t leave Zola to him. Could I? The others turned the corner and an eruption of shouts, gunfire, and magic exploded across the yard. I glanced back, one hand on my gun, the other aching for my staff.

“Adannaya.” His accent wasn’t thick, or noticeable. His inflection was simply dead, a lifeless thing. “You tried once before. You will fail again.”

There was no incantation. He simply flicked out his arm like he was dismissing a fly and a firestorm erupted around Zola.

“Orbis Tego!”
she cried as the flames bore down on her. A circle shield sprang to life and turned the spell away, sending wheels of fire roaring into the air and burning a nearby tree to ash in a heartbeat.

Ezekiel gestured with his right arm, a simple ‘come here’ motion, and the ground exploded all around us. Dirt and debris sailed through the air, raining down around us as dead things rose into the night. Skeletons and corpses of animals and men floated silently for a moment. They didn’t move on their own. The bastard made it look effortless as he picked them up with a torrent of necromancy and began hammering away at Zola’s shield. Bones cracked and shattered again and again.

“You will fail, Adannaya.” Another strike fell. Sparking bolts of electric blue lightning cracked into the air as more and more dead hammered against the shield. The mass grew into a sickening cloud of bones and flesh, undulating and crashing in a never-ending assault.

“Your mentor could not stop me. What hope have you?” He raised his arms high. The swarm of corpses and dead auras and white bone crushed together in a single, vicious wedge. I saw Zola turn her head away. She was done. The blade came down fast, so fast. The shield held for a moment longer, hissing and sparking as Zola began to scream.

It occurred to me, at that point, I was running straight into something with the power to swat me like a fly. Zola’s shield fell and she grunted, falling backwards. The focus at my belt was already in my hand. I wished my staff wasn’t lying beside my master, but I gritted my teeth and forged an aural blade, bolstering it with a tiny piece of my soul. I stumbled a half step as my consciousness shifted, becoming less real and more focused as the blade channeled a torrent of power through my aura, into my body, and up into the soulsword.

One quick strike and the blazing golden blade broke the congealed mass of dead things bearing down on my master. A quick turn to the side and another flick of my wrist severed Ezekiel’s ties to them all. Zola was quick enough to fire an incantation into the falling debris, knocking it away from us both.

I took two steps toward Ezekiel, sword at the ready. Four mages melted out of the shadows and appeared to either side of him. I pulled my gun out awkwardly with my left hand.

“Enough,” a voice boomed. Gravelly, worn, the voice of a man who’d seen more things than any man should.

Ezekiel stopped. His gaze bore into my own, and then he looked at Zola. “None of you will survive this night. I will not play this game Pinkerton plays.”

Six quick bursts of gunfire rang out and three of the mages around Ezekiel died on their feet.

“Thank you, Dell,” the gravelly voice said as its owner wandered forward from the shadows beside the mansion. “Put that soulsword away, son. Using your own soul. Idiot.” His irritated tone reminded me of Zola. I let the sword fade.

“You,” Ezekiel growled, the first hint of emotion I’d heard in his voice. “You would follow me across this damned world only to die here?” Soulswords appeared in each of Ezekiel’s hands as he started toward the newcomer.

The man stepped into the moonlight and I almost flinched. His face was a mass of scars. Some were hidden by his beard, but it couldn’t hide them all. Mountains and valleys formed across his hands and forearms in the moonlight, all bearing scars worse than those across his face.

“You think you’re the only one with a new bag of tricks?” he said. His hand snapped forward, palm to the sky. I couldn’t be sure of what I saw, but it looked like something black and sickly leapt out of his scars and flew into the night. Ezekiel grunted and crossed his soulswords. An explosion of black and red and white ribbons careened off into the night, killing the last mage standing beside Ezekiel and extinguishing both Ezekiel’s blades.

Ezekiel laughed. It was a low, stuttering growl that sent gooseflesh racing across my neck far beyond anything the icy air could conjure.

“One hundred fifty years, Old Man,” he said, and it was as though ‘Old Man’ was the newcomer’s name. “Your apprentice is still weak.”

“She is no apprentice,” the Old Man said. “She’s still pure, unlike the filth you’ve become.” Ezekiel started to say something more, but the Old Man cut him off. “We have friends in higher places than you can imagine.” He raised his hand to the sky and a bolt of electric blue lightning leapt into the air with a crack.

The Thunderbird answered, crashing to the ground in a flash of its own lightning. Its head cocked toward Ezekiel, and then toward the Old Man. Neither moved.

“It could kill you,” the Old Man growled.

“Perhaps, but I don’t—”

The Thunderbird’s wing flashed out and struck Ezekiel. It knocked the necromancer to the ground as though a freight train had fallen from the sky to crush him. Dust and snow settled around the impact, Ezekiel face down at its center. A moment later Ezekiel moved his head slightly to look up from the debris-strewn field.

Edgar was descending, gliding down from the roof of the mansion.

Ezekiel’s gaze snapped back to the Old Man. “We are not finished.” The blackened chaff of a gravemaker boiled up from the ground and enveloped Ezekiel’s body, a void swallowing light, swallowing ley energy, until it billowed out and misted away, leaving nothing behind.

“No, we’re not,” the Old Man said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“W
hat the devil are you all doing here?” the Old Man asked.

We gaped at him in silence.

“Whatever you’re after, rest assured the bastard sent that thing after it.”

“What thing?” I asked. “We’re after my Mom.”

He met my eyes and his gaze was unwavering, his confidence a seething and inescapable presence. Ley lines curled and bent around him as though they were pining to touch their god. His body had a thin yellow glow all around it. That glow gave me goose bumps so bad I finally understood every cliché phrase about jumping out of your skin. He shook his head, a jarringly normal movement, and blew out a breath. “That didn’t just
look
like a gravemaker. It
was
a gravemaker.”

“Ezekiel?” I said.

“It’s too much to explain right now. You’d better get to your mother before she’s dead. Vesik?”

I nodded and then paused, stuck between horror and curiosity. “How did you know my name?”

“Word gets around our circles.” He gave Zola a significant glance before he coughed and spat on the ground. The hand that rose to rub his beard was just as cut and scarred as his face.

“You want to do something about
that,”
Edgar said as he hooked his thumb at the Thunderbird.

“Bah, he’s harmless,” the Old Man said as he walked up to the towering bird and scratched its neck. The Thunderbird leaned into the Old Man like a puppy, arching its neck and firing thunderbolts into the air as he reached up with both hands for a more vigorous scratching.

Edgar just blinked. “But, the balance? Good and evil, it shouldn’t, you shouldn’t—”

Zola laughed quietly. “Edgar is trying to say it should kill you on sight to maintain a balance.”

“Balance?” the Old Man said as he turned away from the Thunderbird. It nosed him in the back. “You think good can't exist without evil? Evil without good? Semantic idiocy. Some things simply are.”

A distant gunshot brought me back to the moment.

The Old Man pointed to the shadows. “Dell, help the others. Stay out of the basement.” Someone moved and raced toward the back of Rivercene. I could have sworn he was grumbling under his breath “Dell shoot the bad guys. Dell run here. Dell do my goddamned laundry.”

I liked him already.

We all moved. I followed the shadow to the west, gun drawn and ready for killing. The Old Man’s skin seemed to darken and become harder to see as he moved past me, sidling up beside Mike and Zola as Edgar took to the sky.

“Fire demon,” he said before they got out of earshot. “This should be fun.”

Dell came up short at the edge of the house and peeked around. He motioned for me to move up and I did, moving in a crouch to take cover beside a wide tree trunk.

“Just pick them off on the outside,” he said. “Watch. The Old Man will move them out for us.”

And so he did, quite literally. The Old Man and Mike went into such a frenzy the vampires backed off and gawked. The fire demon and the Old Man moved together, weaving between the seven necromancers as spells and gunshots shattered the night around them. The Old Man pushed one cloaked form into the path of Mike’s arcing, flaming hammer. The weapon hissed as it sank into the ground, flattening earth as surely as it flattened the man in its way. Mike twirled to the right and launched the next necromancer back toward the Old Man as a flicker of darkness lit down his scarred arm. A jerk of the Old Man’s hand scythed the necromancer in two. The next raised his arms and started to scream, but Mike cut that short with a swing like a baseball bat. The man crumpled around the head of the hammer and smashed into a nearby tree. Six went down in seconds.

The last necromancer ran toward us, screaming. Foster was behind him, running with his sword raised, ready to strike.

“I don’t have a clear shot,” Dell said.

“Foster, down!” I shouted.

He dropped like a rock, flattening against the grass.

The necromancer barely had time to think about stopping as I stepped out from behind the tree and pulled the second trigger on the pepperbox. His head vanished and Dell cursed as all six rounds found their mark.

“What the hell are you shooting?” he asked, his already high-pitched voice rising into a shrill squeak. “A goddamned cannon?”

“Pretty much,” Foster said as he climbed back to his feet. “That was the last one.”

I grinned and held my hand out to Dell. His hair looked dark blond in the square of light cast down by the sudden arrival of a porch light. Both our heads snapped up to spy the innkeeper. I turned my attention back to our new compatriot.

“I’m Damian.”

“Dell,” he said as he shook my hand in a firm grip. His eyes were the cool gray-blue of a born necromancer.

“Inside,” the innkeeper said from her perch above us. “The others are around front.” We walked back toward the front of Rivercene. Voices grew louder as we made it back to the corner and reached the others standing around the front porch.

“Your help, it is most welcome,” Vassili said as he shook hands with the Old Man. “Who are you?”

“A friend,” he said.

“I have heard the stories, if all are to be believed.” Vassili paused and paced silently beside the man. “If they are to be believed, you are a god,
da?”

The Old Man laughed outright. It sounded the same as he looked, cracked and scarred. Vassili narrowed his eyes.