Host (Rogue Mage #3)
Page 6O ver the sulfur and brimstone stench of dying succubus and hacked-to-death dragonets and spawn, over the odor of burning wood, I smelled caramel and brown sugar and felt my body react to the pull of kylen. The low-level mage-heat I lived with day and night flamed high and I turned in a circle, skimming for Thadd.
"Thorn." Eli grabbed my elbow. I shook him away.
From out of the shadows, I heard a hiss of indrawn breath. Even through the protection of the amulet he had brought me, I felt Cheran's body clench. He too smelled kylen. His heat was instantaneous, and if Thadd didn't ease back into the shadows and away from us, Cheran's mating instinct would intensify, driving him into near madness until he found someone to satisfy his lust. I was fighting, my blood flooded with endorphins that cooled ardor, and I'd had better practice at resisting the mating urge brought on by seraphs and kylen, but the other mage clearly had not. Not actively part of the melee, surrounded by the lure-scent of succubus, his visa and primes weren't keeping the uncontrollable sexual arousal of mage-heat at bay.
With mage-sight, I now saw the other mage, breathing too hard, too fast, a blur of warmth and need, the high temperature of passion overriding his glamour as mage-heat took over - the animal rut that came over mages and seraphs in close company. If someone wasn't willing, Cheran would attack and mate by force. The town fathers would flay him alive for rape - and he would deserve it, even if sexual violence didn't bring seraphic judgment down on the town.
I spotted Thadd hunched over in shadow. In mage-sight, he blazed with kylen light, his long coat clutched closed in one fist, pale feathers peeking from the back. Had he removed the conjured ring that kept his kylen attributes in check? Either that or something had happened that allowed me to see his energies as they really were.
Toes touching the outstretched claw of a hand, he bent forward, his fingers tracing the length of the succubus's scaled forearm. The dying beast twitched, claw scraping on the ice. Stepping closer, Thadd caressed its armored chest as if it were a woman's perfect breast.
The queen had been built from mage and Stanhope genetic material, and enhanced with the stolen essence of Barak, the captured Watcher I had freed. The succubus scent was tantalizing to human males, to seraphs, and to kylen, who were the result of matings between mage, seraph, and later, humans. Cheriour, the Angel of Punishment who'd left his sigil on the roadway, once went into violent sexual arousal at the scent.
If I called mage in dire and a seraph answered my call, would it go into heat rather than to war? Had that been part of the Darkness's plan all along? My own heat was growing, a warm pulsation low in my belly. Battle dire was supposed to stop mage-heat. Something was very wrong. What should I do?
Eli whirled me around and shook me. My teeth clacked together with the force. "What's wrong with you?"
I lifted a hand, traced the length of his jaw with my knuckles, my longsword trailing behind the caress. His mouth opened in surprise and I leaned against him. It was hard to find words but the visa pulsed once and my mind cleared enough to say, "The dragonets and the succubus were made with Mole Man's blood, which confuses the Host. The succubus was created to make seraphs go into heat. Dangerous, deadly heat. It's already begun. Don't you feel it?" I pressed my body against his.
His eyes widened but he didn't pull away. "There're no seraphs here," he said.
I breathed in, smelling kylen, and wrapped my arms around Eli, my blades clinking together at his back. His body was warm, sweat-drenched, and I melded mine around him, breathing in his scent, musky with battle. "It wants me to mate. It wants me to call mage in dire. The smell of succubus and mage will make answering seraphs go into a mating fury. I don't know what would happen or how bad it could get. I - "
The ground shook beneath us, and Eli spread his feet for balance. The itchy feeling I had been suppressing all week intensified, enticing me from the hypnotic heat. Something was coming. Something big. The shaking of the ground increased. The visa pulsed again and I shook myself, trying to think, to reason. Earthquake.
Jasper, his face tight with fear and revulsion at the way I was grinding myself into Eli, seized a porch column and held on. Thadd looked up from the queen's carcass and licked his lips. My heat-rating went from battle-controlled to orgy-hot. I unwound from Eli and stepped toward Thadd. From my left, Cheran appeared. He was peeling out of the velvet cloak, the jacket and shirt beneath falling to the ground. I dropped the tanto and the longsword and pulled at the fastenings of my cloak. I could have a mage and kylen at once. I could -
Eli slapped my face so hard my head whipped back. Thadd watched, his eyes hot with desire. The ground shook, knocking me flat. Eli crouched over me, supporting himself on his arms. His body smelled of human pheromones, blood, and that strange form of lust soldiers experience during combat. I slid a hand into his jeans, grasping him with tight fingers. He sucked in a startled breath. From Cheran, I heard an excited growl and I laughed. A human, a mage, and a kylen. I could have all three. "Yessss," I hissed. "All three. Now."
"Much as I like having your hand in my britches, lady, this ain't exactly the time or the place," Eli said, squirming away. "What's got into you? Three what?" Danger forgotten, I gripped his shoulders and arched up into him, sweeping the streets for Thadd and Cheran.
In a blur of speed, Audric raced from the dark and barreled into Thadd. They bowled away, into the shadows. My head cleared. I jerked my hand free of Eli's jeans and shook my head. "Seraph st - " I stopped myself, feeling a flush cover me in a different kind of heat as embarrassment swept through me.
Eli, who had my wrist in his hand and a probing but interested look on his face, dropped his grip, stood, and stepped back. The ground was still shaking, a low, slow rumble as if the earth was purring. Or growling.
"Thorn?" Rupert asked from nearby. His voice grew formal. "Mistrend. What's that?"
I snapped my mouth closed and followed his pointing finger. The streetlights had burned out nearly a century ago, and the smoke-filled street, lit only by the flickering light of multiple fires, had darkened. A wash of gray filled in the already dark spaces between snatches of light.
"Something evil this way comes," a voice out of the night said, as if quoting.
"A big powerful evil," a second voice said.
"Yeah. A big, honking, evil mofo," Eli said. He pulled me to my feet. Above us was a cloud of Darkness.
"This little war here," Eli said, understanding. "The Dragon was using it, siphoning off our energies to power the earthquake. Getting you and a Stanhope, while important, were secondary to the first part of the plan."
"Yeah," I said. "That feels right."
Dragonets whipped through the cloud, writhing in pleasure, brushing against one another in sensuous abandon. Whatever dragonets liked couldn't be good for the rest of us. It wasn't easy, but I pushed away the residual heat, picked up my weapons, and stepped into the cat.
Near me, Cheran was fastening his clothes. "Powers and high-level Principalities of Darkness once could assume any form they wished, including the form of a cloud," he said, his voice sounding dazed. "They had full seraphic gifts. But God the Victorious stripped them of most such abilities at the Fall. Some can still assume one shape that's more than a glamour, but not a true transmogrification, like the succubus queen." He indicated the cloud with a jut of his head. "That looks like true transmogrification, a true seraphic gift."
The cloud rolled low, taking with it the little bit of light that came from windows, doors, and fires. I took a tentative breath. It smelled of dying lilies.
"What makes a Darkness with seraphic gifts so special?" Rupert asked, his voice thick.
"Something happened in the otherness," I said, remembering the sensation of being beneath the ground, trapped, fighting for my life and the lives of others. My scars blazed with white light and remembered pain as the cloud descended over us.
"What's an otherness?" Rupert asked. He rubbed his face, and then stared at his hand, which trembled with exhaustion.
"I think it's the same thing as the heavens. Or part of the heavens," I said. "I think this means that Darkness found a victory there and gained back a foothold."
"Enough to give it power to transmogrify?" Eli asked. "If so, it's got honking big mojo."
"Whatever it is," Rupert said, "I think it's poisonous." He fell forward, landing face-first on the hard ice. My heart wrenched and I stepped over him, shielding him as I turned in a slow circle, watching. The cloud of Darkness rolled up the street like a wave. Men and women fell as if poleaxed, all except Eli, Cheran, and the EIH, who pulled gas masks over their faces. I saw Eli hand a spare mask to Lucas.
I had no incantation for clean air. I had no way to help Rupert. He was breathing, however, and that meant he was alive. Audric's half-mage genetic structure would provide him some protection from the gaseous Dark. I didn't know about Thadd. Whatever the cloud was, it seemed to have been designed to affect only humans. Cheran and I were still upright.
A voice whispered, and I turned, searching for its source. "Little mage. I have tasted of you." My heart rate sped up, an uneven riff of fear as I pivoted, placing my feet to either side of my friend. Cheran stepped slowly away from me, body relaxed, throwing-blades held loosely.
"Friend of yours?" he asked.
"No. Not a friend."
"That's what I was afraid of," Eli said, his voice muffled behind the mask.
Tendrils of the cloud brushed my face, slid along my seared, scraped arm, as cold and wintery as the fingers of death. I searched the deeper night, blades curling up and around in the egret. I glanced up. The moon and the stars were gone.
"I have placed a drop of your blood between my lips," the voice said. "I claim you. Come to me."
"Moving in beside you, Thorn," Eli said, "at your four o'clock. Try not to cut off my head." I chuckled, and the tone was dead, as if all sound stopped inches from my mouth. "Lucas is at your eight," he finished.
"Yeah. Okay," I said. I stopped turning. I felt light-headed and the back of my throat was tickling, so there was some effect.
The cloud slid inside my battle cloak, and I felt it moving against my skin. My flesh quivered and I wanted to throw up as it brushed my belly. It felt like claws, a conjure to render me weaponless and filled with terror. The world wavered beneath me, and I thought again, earthquake, but this time it was only vertigo. Burning acid rose in the back of my throat.
"You are the Thorn," it whispered. "I have waited long for you."
My cloak billowed out as if a strong wind swirled beneath it. The tanto in my hand blazed bright blue and sang a note of warning that hurt my ears.
"I desired a child of your body, through the Mole Man's lineage." Claws scraped down my sides, curious, possessive.
I swallowed the acid down, a convulsive spasm. "Fancy that," I said, bravado the only weapon I had left. Weakness leached into my bones from the night air, freezing. The Dragon was close enough to draw on our energies. Death was coming to the town and I didn't know how to stop it. I clamped my arms tight to my sides, my useless blades crossed at my waist.
The thing in the air chuckled, the sound of a lover, amused. "Come. I desire you."
Muscles weak, I slid to my knees, straddling Rupert. His body was warm beneath me, my shins and knees cold on the ice. Up and down the street the elders who had prayed, shouting scripture in spiritual warfare, lay silent and still. I missed the continuous sound of their litany, a background to the warfare of steel and explosives.
"You will be mine. You carry my talisman," it said, its voice a sibilant hiss.
Blue light blazed like a torch in the darkness, trilling a piercing cry. I saw my hand setting the tanto on the street. I placed the longsword beside it. My hand went into a pocket.
"What the flying f - heck is she doing?" Eli said, barely avoiding swearing in the presence of the Dark. I wanted to laugh. As if the cloud surrounding us needed any help at all. "What's she holding?" he asked no one in particular.
It was a six-inch-long claw from the underside of a dragonet leg. A spur. A thorn. I stroked the talisman, feeling the power thrum within it. I had carried it with me, in the pocket of my cloak, since it pierced my side. "Forcas used it to try to claim me," I said.
"Forcas was my errand boy," the Darkness breathed, "delivering the thorn of binding." The spur hummed in my hand. Not the empty vessel I had thought, the spur had been waiting for this moment, this Darkness. In mage-sight, it glowed like a black opal with fire at its heart.
In some small, rational part of my brain, I knew I had been stupid to keep it, a keepsake of victory disguising a defeat postponed. Stupid, stupid, stupid, my mental voice condemned. I watched as my hand lifted, arm straight, pointing the barbed, razor-sharp spur at my left side. My scars blazed with a strange smoky light. The unhealed psychic wound on my side knotted tightly, the sensation more pleasure than pain. Something long and sinuous twisted through me.
"Come. You are mine."
I belong to someone? A gentle joy welled up in me, surging with the beat of my heart. I was no longer alone. I was so tired of being alone. So tired of fighting.
"Thorn?"
"Stop her!"
A hand grabbed my arm, ripped the spur from me, and threw it to the street. Another raised a battle-ax above the amulet. The steel blade smashed down, breaking the talisman, disrupting the conjure. A shaft of dark lightning shot into the sky. Audric fell away from the broken barb, grunting. Thunder echoed down the street. Pain wrenched through my scars and a single pulse of white light lit them, a terrible schema of old wounds and ancient pain. For an instant, my amulets shone bright as a Flame. In the retinal afterburn, the world was a negative reality, black snow and white sky.
"What was that thing?" Eli shouted through the muffling of the gas mask. Audric, lying on the snow, shook with a single epilepticlike tremor in the aftermath of the explosion.
I snatched up my blades and stood. The whir of wings sounded and I tried to dance over Rupert's body, but stumbled, falling to the side. A blow sent me sprawling. A stinger whipped by my ear. A second dragonet hovered over Rupert, barbed legs to either side, long snarled fur dragging the street. The flying beast slashed a long gash down my friend's back.
I leaped at the beast's head, changing my grip on the tanto, bringing the weapon forward along the plane of my body. I drew on the prime amulet in the hilt of the longsword, pulled on the prime ring and visa, drawing all the power at my disposal into me. Strength poured in.
Midstrike, the visa suggested a verse from Job and I shouted, my voice swelling through the tourmaline into a mighty roar as I cut. "His hand hath pierced the swift serpent!" In a death strike, I thrust up under its jaw with the last word, snapping its mouth shut, driving the blade up through the roof of its mouth. The final thud against the top of its skull was a satisfying finish, forcing back its head, but again the tanto missed its tiny brain.
In a ferocious flex of muscle, it rose into the air over me, wrenching my left arm up as I gripped the tanto hilt. It carried my body high and again I shouted the scripture. Below me, a second dragonet darted in. I caught a glimpse of gray metal, a shaped ring, demon-iron forged over human steel. The claw holding it slid the steel along my body, into the bite wound on my calf. I screamed as the frozen metal seared down to the bone.
With a supple twist, the beast then dipped the iron against Rupert's body, following the length of the bloody wound in his back. When it came away, Rupert's blood splattered over my shins, hot and human, mixed with mage-blood. Comprehension blossomed, wordless.
Fear tightened my body and set off sparks in my vision. I understood why it had suggested Job in warfare. This was the vision of true Darkness Job had seen and prophesied. "Let that day be darkness; Let not God from above seek for it, Neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it.... Who are ready to rouse up leviathan."
Leviathan.
This was the opponent we faced, an evil who had played two roles in the rebellion against the High Host: as one who joined the Watchers, became their leader, and taught humans the arts of war before language had been recorded, and also as the left hand of Lucifer, taking part in that one's rebellion against heaven. Since the time of the Last War, Leviathan had been coupled with the name Azazel. Azazel was the left hand of Satan.
This Dragon had been bound three times, twice in prehistory, and once by Mole Man's sacrifice. The Dragon of Darkness was greater than we had guessed. I wondered if Mole Man had known the beast's name.
The coil of air tightened, growing darker, shot through with motes of emptiness like holes in the universe, a Darkness so intense it trailed afterimages of lightless tails. The spiral of power centered on the demon-iron in the claw of the small dragonet. A link three inches across, smeared in Rupert's blood. In my blood. "Oh, merciful seraphs," I breathed. The Dragon, partially unbound from Mole Man's chain, was manifesting.
The tornado of power slipped through the link like a finger gliding through a ring and carried it into the night air, swirling through it in a twisting, undulating snake of black cloud. Dragonets flew beside it, trumpeting in victory. The ground trembled as the earthquake shuddered through the ancient hills.
Audric and Eli were right. It was indeed much more than a two-fer. Layered intentions, incantations, and conjures, purposes that covered every possible contingency. The Dragon was using the death of the townsfolk, the mixed blood, its minions, and the link to break fully free. The Dark Wind whipped overhead, the spirit form of the Dragon.
Close by, the WT7 boomed. A dragonet split in two, spraying me with gore, its head tumbling into the night. The two-foot section between was vaporized. The big gun boomed again. Flames darted across my line of sight, zapping the dragonets. Where had they been, the Flames and the big weapon? Fighting what? I remembered to breathe, my ribs creaking with the motion. The cloud of Darkness hurt to inhale, bitter with the taste of failure.
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.