Deck of destiny 4, p.9
Deck of Destiny 4, page 9
The clink of spurs caught my ears, and magic flared around my fingers.
The Cowboy had arrived to claim his bounty.
And I was out in the dark and the rain by myself.
Chapter 11
Details swam into my peripheral vision as magic washed around my fingertips.
Rain hammered down from overhead, cut off easy visibility, and my boots splashed in a half-inch of water on the sidewalk. I’d found myself out on the street, with an alley off to my right. My truck with my vampire escort stood fifty yards ahead, and something white flashed out of the alley. White runes blazed in the corner of my field of view, and a two-yard-tall monster barreled out of the shadows.
My Heartpiercer Rapier appeared in my dominant hand, and I skidded to a halt on the rain-soaked concrete. Some kind of blend of a horse, unicorn, and a grizzly bear let out a trumpeting sound, and a wicked pair of horns that reminded me of a stag slashed toward me. The Cowboy had timed his attack perfectly, but the slippery terrain gave me a single second of advantage. I dropped down into a slide, tore my jeans open, and shoved the point of the rapier up at the monster on my flank.
Gold horns missed me by a half-inch, and the razor-sharp steel needle in my hand bit into its throat. Bright gold ichor splattered into the air as I slid just out of range of the creature. The summon slid to a halt on thick hooves, wheeled around to face me, and I forced myself to breathe as I scrambled to my feet. Green runes washed through my hand as I summoned my own monster. The Knarlback Alpha sprang out of the concrete under the thunderous hooves of the bear-horse. Its wide jaws clamped down onto its rear leg like a pneumatic press, tore through bones, and the Cowboy’s summon let out an earsplitting howl of pain.
I wheeled around on my heel as the creature staggered back. Its feet kicked out my summon, but the Knarlback maintained its grip on the horse-monsters like a bulldog. The Knarlback ripped its head from side to side, tore the unicorn off balance, and I rammed Wilson’s old rapier straight into the creature’s flank. The narrow blade ripped clean through its hide, punched through a lung, and I tore my weapon free a second later.
I was dead if I stayed out in the open.
Old reflexes had saved my life, and I lunged backward toward the front corner of the alley. A verdant bolt of power hissed out of the dark, missed my shoulder by an inch, and exploded against a parked car on the other side of the street. Twisting vines studded with thorns immediately swam out from the point of impact, snared the outside body of the car, and crushed it inward like a can of soda. I hauled in a breath as I heard that low whistle again, followed by a soft chuckle. The Knarlback dragged the unicorn into the street, ripped its maw free from the summon’s hind leg, and tore its throat out a moment later. The enormous creature exploded into a wash of white-and-gold runes, and a new decision opened up in front of me.
I could stand my ground, fight, and test myself against the assassin sent to kill me.
Or I could bail, negate the risk, and force the Cowboy onto more familiar ground.
My truck’s engine growled into life at the other side of the street, and gears crunched as Tilly got the vehicle moving. The green arrow of energy had practically turned a sedan inside out, and with an open street like this, we’d be sitting ducks if the Cowboy decided to give chase. I heard his chuckle again, consulted my mental map of my Deck, and decided to use what I already had available to me. The Knarlback let out a growl as I reached out with my mind, seized control of its senses, and pushed it into the alleyway. The insectile rhino sprang into the mouth of the alley with blinding speed and caught a quick glimpse of a familiar figure. A long, lean outline relaxed against a wall, and a bright green burst of energy surrounded his fingertips as he saw the new threat. He drew his hand back as if pulling the string back on a bow, and he loosed another burst of emerald magic. The Knarlback’s momentum carried it straight into the bolt of power, but I disengaged my mind from the creature and despawned it before the blow could land. I forced myself to shove out from the outside of the alley, push inward as the bolt of power whipped past me, and violet runes curled into existence around my hand as I summoned my Hellforge Skeletons from the wall behind him. The Cowboy shoved off the wall with a laugh as steel blades attached to bones erupted from the bricks, narrowly missed his unprotected back, and gave me the opening I needed to close the distance between us.
The mercenary winked at me as I blazed in with the Heartpiercer Rapier.
He sidestepped at the very last second, slipped the blow, and a flash of red runes appeared in his hand. A wicked-looking pigsticker appeared in his hand and punched up toward my unprotected ribs. I twisted away from the blow just in time, felt the knife shear through my belt, and red energy pulsed through my body as I activated a close-range Card that I’d picked up off Daine’s former bouncer. Brawler Style surged through my body as I twisted in a rapid half-circle and threw a crazy spinning elbow at the Cowboy. He turtled in his head, I tore the hat clean off his head, and he planted a boot on the wall behind him as he backstepped and prepared to re-engage. I shoved myself off to the left to create more space to use the Rapier, but I realized too late that it’d been a feint.
My focus on the Hellforge Skeletons vanished, and they disappeared into flashes of deep purple runes. My breath caught in my throat, and panic started to set into my nervous system.
White magic thundered into life at the end of the alley, and another shining unicorn from my worst nightmares exploded into being. Scarlet power flickered at the mouth of the alley as I slammed myself flat against the wall. Knife-like projectiles howled down toward the Cowboy as Tilly joined the fray, and I turned my attention to the monster in front of me. It already had the momentum and the speed, and the narrow alley prevented me from sidestepping out of the way of its wicked horns. A crazy idea washed through my head at the last second. My Rapier was too far to cut the monster, but I threw a straight left superman punch at the monster’s nose as it dropped its head to gore me.
Red power from Brawler Style rocketed down my arm, snapped the creature’s head downward, and threw it off-balance. I dropped my weight, bent my knees, and its horns sparked off the bricks where my head had been a second ago. I slashed the point of my Rapier up into its flank as it stumbled past me, and I shot back to my feet and faced the mouth of the alley.
The Cowboy bobbed and weaved around Tilly’s airborne blades.
The vampiress let out a vicious snarl of frustration as he blurred around each projectile. The assassin seemed untouchable. The blades missed his skin by a hair as he danced around each of the lances of energy, and green power rippled back over his fingertips. The unicorn barreled past him, made a beeline for Tilly, and I lunged at the Cowboy’s unprotected flank. The knife vanished from the mercenary’s fingers, and he dropped forward onto his hands like an acrobat. Booted spurs slammed into my gut as my blade hissed over his back, and he donkey-kicked me onto my ass deeper into the alley. The blow hadn’t been magical in nature, which meant that I got to keep my ribs.
He was too fast. Too good. And his reflexes rivaled that of a vampire.
Just who the hell had sent this man to take my life?
My coven backup blurred inward as the Cowboy moved to right himself. Blood-red runes flared out from the palms of her hands, and bright-red flame circled her fists as she snapped a punch out at the mercenary. He twisted on his hands in some kind of insane break-dance move, blasted her feet out from under her, and brought both of his boots down at her in a double axe kick. Tilly shot an arm up to fend off his spurs, grunted as she took the force of his strike, and it gave me the time I needed to scramble back to my feet. The enormous, white-flanked monster wheeled around at the mouth of the alley, set itself up for a second charge, and I realized that we were outmatched. I’d seen the Cowboy cast three different kinds of spell in the last thirty seconds, but there was another factor buffing both his reflexes and his speed.
My Heartpiercer Rapier blazed down at the Cowboy’s throat from above, but he shoved off the alleyway wall with superhuman strength, skidded a yard across the rough concrete, and came back to his feet a second later. I blazed past him, lunged over Tilly’s prone form, and slammed my rapier straight into the charging monster’s eye. The reach of the weapon was just enough.
I gored clean into its skull, dissolved the monster into a dazzling flash of gold and white, and rocked back on my heels as the telltale dissolution of a summon washed past me. I dispelled the rapier a second later, caught hold of Tilly’s hoodie, and hauled her up onto her feet. Fresh red shards of power circled the air around her as I pulled her up, and she sent another salvo streaking into the alley at the Cowboy. He slipped effortlessly past each of the projectiles with an unnaturally fast blur of motion, and I hauled her clean out of the alley and toward my waiting truck.
“What are you doing?” Tilly demanded. “We can—”
“No time,” I panted. “City’s lost power. Someone’s opened a rift.”
She let out another fierce growl, but she snapped my hands away from her jacket, and I dived into the driver’s side of the Dodge. The engine was still running somehow—despite the EMP that had blazed through Millbank—and I snapped off the handbrake. Tilly dived into the tray behind the cab, and I gunned the engine as hard as I could. Rubber screamed against asphalt, and I pulled the truck into an immediate left turn as we left the alley behind us. Dragons piled out of the Goldfire, led by Bess, but I couldn’t focus on any of them.
I still had a lunatic behind me who could turn my truck inside out.
I slewed around a corner, felt the entire chassis of the truck shift, and roared down a side street toward the main stretch that led me back toward Phoenix HQ. I dared a glance into the rear-view mirror, but no gigantic white horse-like demons thundered after me. The air was clear of green arrows of magic. I didn’t take my foot off the gas until I’d put three blocks between us and the Goldfire, and I wound down the back window of the cab as I slowed. Tilly effortlessly snaked her way into the cab from the tray, wound the window up behind her, and spat out a curse in her native language.
“Fucking Hestia-crowned daymares,” she said.
My eyes widened.
I’d understood her. I could hear what she was saying, and I knew it wasn’t English, but the words had rung through and struck a chord in my mind that I hadn’t discovered before. The brand on the back of my neck sent a cold chill down my spine as I focused on her words and tried to speak aloud in the same tongue.
It came through effortlessly. As if I’d been speaking vampirese my whole life.
“Daymares?”
Tilly’s eyes went almost as wide as dinner plates. She switched back to English.
“You can understand me?” she demanded.
“Perks of the job?” I guessed.
“What happened to you? You shouldn’t be able to—”
“Let’s focus less on the fact that I can understand you and more on the fact that the city went dark and a rift opened at the same time,” I fired back. “What kind of creature would do that on the way over? Do you know?”
Tilly hissed quietly to herself. “Elfkin.”
A completely involuntary curse exploded out of my mouth. “Elves?”
“You heard about the last time they crossed, didn’t you?”
“Lana said something about it. Fukushima?”
The vampiress nodded. “They don’t much care for your technology.”
“You’re telling me that you don’t use it as well?”
“Doesn’t make it mine,” she fired back. “Real question is what the fuck they’re doing here. It got something to do with that little morsel you picked up back in Wilson’s drug lab?”
My mind lunged immediately to Iris. She’d warned me about this.
I didn’t know what I’d just gotten myself into, but I had a feeling that it was somehow tied to the cure. She’d told me that once she cleared the Juju out of her system, she’d be free. I’d still been on the fence about whether or not she’d take me up on the offer, but something told me that she had. I cranked the truck into a higher gear as I hit a main arterial. Curious and scared eyes appeared at windows, and people with umbrellas and raincoats spilled out of their homes as they waited for emergency services. Sirens screamed in the air as EMS teams moved out to secure order, and I focused every inch of my attention on the road.
We needed to get back behind the warded walls of the HQ—and fast.
I had no idea what the elves were doing, but I trusted Tilly’s instincts.
They lined up with what Iris and the Black Dawn had told me.
And my best source of information about them had just been sworn into my Guild.
“You’ve been around longer than I have,” I said. “How much shit are we in?”
The vampiress’s smile flashed in my rear-view mirror. “That depends. Whoever just tried to kill you isn’t going to stop. Smart of him to come after you when you were panicking. He’s a hunter.”
“A hunter?”
“He knows his prey. He ambushed you right when your focus was off, and he almost did you in.” Tilly stretched out her arms in the back seat. “If I hadn’t been there—”
“I owe you one,” I agreed.
Another flash of adorable fangs. “Careful, hotshot. I might actually call that in.”
Something in her tone made my skin warm. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Tilly assured me. “It was a good fight. Got my blood moving.”
“Elves,” I said and pulled the truck into the side street beside my building. “What do you know about them? Are they going to nuke Millbank off the map?”
“Let’s hope not,” Tilly told me. “I’m starting to like it here. And I don’t know. I wasn’t around the last time they started goosestepping all over Earth. All I can tell you is that if you think we’re dangerous?”
Her eyes flashed with excitement. “They’re ten times worse.”
Chapter 12
I pulled up outside the garage, hit the fob on my set of keys, and watched as the door failed to open itself. I muttered a curse under my breath as I realized that power had also been cut to the HQ. I heard Tilly laugh to herself as I reversed the truck, pulled it into the alley behind the HQ, and slid out of it. The steady pour of rain added to the sensation of being a drowned rat, and I swept the street flanking my building for any sign of the Cowboy or his monsters.
I didn’t see anything except rain, dark buildings, and blurs of movement behind faded-out windows. Tilly inhaled a deep breath as she stepped out onto the asphalt behind me, and her mesmerizing eyes glittered as she leaned back for another inhale of the air.
“What are you picking up?” I asked.
“Fear,” she murmured. “So much of it.”
My eyes moved over the back of the building, but the rear doors were electronically locked, and I knew I wasn’t getting into the HQ without taking the front door. Tilly caught my hand before I moved out into the street.
“Where do you want me?” she asked.
“Perimeter of vampires still around the building?”
She frowned and shook her head. “That’s strange, I would’ve thought that they’d—”
The vampiress suddenly went statue-still, and the alarms in the back of my head started screaming louder. Something was deeply wrong about the air around us. I didn’t have Tilly’s abnormal powers of smell, but I could tell something was awry. Her fingers tightened into a vise around my wrist, and she dragged me back toward the truck with a burst of strength. I hissed a curse as she almost dislocated my arm, and I went still as a strange silvery construct stalked past the mouth of the alley.
My balls practically jumped up into my throat. The monster had spindly, almost wire-thin limbs, and it moved with a jerky motion. The closest thing I could liken it to was some kind of mechanical blend of a jellyfish and a spider, constructed from silvery-blue metal. Runes shone over its body, and their sharp angularity caught my attention after a second.
Iris had scrawled similar runes in my garage.
The spidery figure paused. It had to be two yards tall if it was an inch. An angular cockpit sat in the middle of it, too small to be crewed by any regular humanoid, and bright blue eyes swung around to face us. The blue runes around the creature shone a sudden blazing azure, and magic lunged into my fingertips as the jelly-spider from hell launched itself into the alley. Snaking, tentacle-like limbs slammed into the bricks with spiked feet, raised it up above our heads, and the glow around the drone grew brighter. Telltale runes swirled around its console, and it let out a low hum that I could barely hear over the rain slamming against my truck.
“Move!” Tilly shouted in vampirese.
The sheer terror in her voice should’ve locked me up in fear. A centuries-old vampire was terrified of the thing in front of us. But it was on my fucking building. Everything about it just made me think of some future-tech sci-fi reject monster from a bad dystopian movie.
And I’d be damned if I let it rip my building apart and threaten my people inside. I lunged forward, directly underneath it, and the Heartpiercer Rapier appeared in my hand with a fresh hand. I was already sore from the last fight with the Cowboy, but I lunged up off my feet and shoved the point of the weapon up toward the drone’s command console. It hoisted itself up with a rapid, unnatural jerk, and one of its arms snaked out of the wall. I slashed out to my right as I missed my strike, and sparks shot into the air as my weapon collided with the steel tendril.
Blue and violet runes shimmered in the air as I tore the clawed foot off the creature. The blue light flashed brighter as it pitched to the side to catch its balance. I landed on the ground and dashed forward. Two more tentacles narrowly missed my unprotected back, crashed into the floor behind me, and I spun around as the drone ripped its limbs free with a spray of asphalt and sparks. I didn’t know what the fuck I was up against, but if I’d learned anything from video games and Terminator movies? Creatures like this couldn’t see everywhere at once.
