The eccentrics knight wa.., p.32
The Eccentrics (Knight Watch Book 3), page 32
Best I could do was scramble closer so I was inside his reach. The cudgel came down, smashing plaster and cracking the floor even worse. Both his elbows went into my shoulders. At least it spared my noggin, but I was forced to sit back down hard and fast. Tembo gestured toward the lich, and there was a flicker of light around his fingers, but nothing materialized. The big mage was still shaking his hand when Lumiere kicked me to the side.
“Don’t let him get the cage!” I shouted as I rolled against the display case. Bee obliged, vaulting over a broken table to scoop up the doll and its container. Lumiere roared and threw his beam at her like a javelin. It missed her, but the resulting explosion of plaster and paneling sliced her up pretty bad. She hit the ground hard, and the cage bounced away. Chesa went for it, but Lumiere grabbed her by her braids and tossed her against the wall.
“You think you can come into my world and do whatever you want?” Lumiere’s booming voice echoed through the bakery like a land mine. “You have ruined my family, my plans, and now my soul.” His steel fingers closed on the cage. Holding it up, he smashed Tembo in the face, then backhanded Matthew. Both went down. “The only way out of this is death. For all of you!”
“Pass!” I shouted. He rotated slowly toward me, the now bloody cage overhead. “You’re going to have to give me that doll, Claude. Before I get serious.”
He looked slowly around the bakery. The rest of the team was down. The room was in ruins. The civilians were gone. There was nothing but destruction and waste.
“Serious how? Seriously funny?” he asked.
“Worse.” I kicked my sword into my hand, gripping it in both hands as I took the best guard I could without a shield. “Seriously swordy.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever—”
I charged forward, shuffling my feet through the wreckage to keep from tripping. Startled, Lumiere swung at me with the cage, but his footing was terrible and he overextended, stumbling slightly to his left. The tip of my sword rattled between the bars, piercing the doll inside. Lumiere gasped, grabbing at his chest. I didn’t wait, driving the sword all the way forward until my hilt cracked against the iron cage. Then I rotated on my right foot, driving my shoulder into his chest with the full weight of my body. Which, admittedly, isn’t that much, but it was enough to get him to drop the cage.
Lumiere grabbed at me as I pushed away from him. Whatever pain he felt was masked by the sheer terror in his voice. “Wait, I can save you!” he shouted as I ran past the counter. “Immortality! Think of it! No end to life!”
“I’d rather die a hero than live a monster.” I hit the kitchen door at a full sprint. Just as I’d hoped, the whole patisserie had descended into the Unreal. A broad hearth burned where the stoves used to be, with a roaring fire in its heart. I skidded to a halt and launched the cage off my sword and into the flames.
Lumiere’s soul burned like a flare. Spears of hot white flame jetted out of the doll’s head and hands, and then the whole effigy burst open. A fiery heart of pure white light roared, flickering into green and coruscating waves of blue and black. The iron cage melted like wax, sealing the blacked outline of the doll into the floor of the hearth. Behind me, Lumiere’s shrieks filled the world.
The Iron Lich burned from the inside out. The light erupted between his joints. Flames licked the metal plates of his chest, and crawled between the gaps in his hand. The crack in his skull bubbled with molten iron, which fell in hissing, spattering drops to the ground. He went to his knees, falling apart even as he reached toward me, hands clenching as though he meant to strangle me with his last breath. But there was no breath. Claude Lumiere was long dead. This mockery of a life drained out of him, burning away in a plume of noxious smoke and the screams of a man who clung to life so hard he crushed everything in it that might have mattered.
He toppled forward and came apart. Inside that frame of iron and bone and ivory, there was nothing that looked like a man. Only ashes, and the brittle machinery of science.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jakub stared at me like I was an unloved cat, returning a previously buried mouse, complete with maggots. We were sitting in a quiet café on the outskirts of Paris. Actual Paris, not the faux version that bubbled throughout the Gestalt, or the gothic landscape that meant so much to the Unreal. Tesla had managed to deliver the invitation and arrange the meeting. I didn’t ask how.
The lord of the vampires sat primly on his chair, hands folded in his lap. To a mundane viewer, he might look like an overdressed banker, or an almost-familiar actor, or maybe just a goth on graduation day. Judging by the few disinterested glances that we drew, no one else saw his pointed teeth, or the thornlike tips of his claws, or the feral set of his eyes. The mundane world was doing a good job of covering up the monster, at least for now. As long as he didn’t try to tear my head off and bathe in my vital fluids.
“Thanks for showing up,” I said. “I wasn’t sure Nik was going to be able to find you.”
“Ever since you gave them our address, the Eccentrics have been dropping by like a mob of angry peasants,” he answered. “We have found other accommodations, but Zofia haunts the old place.”
“So what happened at the tower?” I asked, taking a sip of my coffee. A spike of pain went through the back of my throat, deep into my skull. “SO. SWEET,” I gasped.
“It turns out, Claude Lumiere was more than a match for us. Hardly surprising, given his hand in the creation of the Slayer archetype. But humiliating, nonetheless.” He took the coffee cup from my shaking hand, then carefully poured the contents into a nearby plant. “I take it you fared better.”
“Every Achilles has his heel. There was a lot more Vodun in his mythos than I expected, to be honest. But we got it done. And your family? ZeeZee? Aleks?”
“Zoria is well. Alekzander is watching from across the street. He is looking for an excuse to come over here and pummel you.”
I glanced out the window and saw the hulking vampire, trying to appear innocuous behind the pages of a copy of Le Monde. “I’m sorry you’ve been driven from your home,” I said carefully. The next part was delicate. “Were you able to save the others?”
“You know very well that I wasn’t,” Jakub said stiffly. “The bodies, certainly, but Lumiere’s machine—”
“Great!” I rummaged around in my haversack, then produced a wooden rack of a dozen glass vials. Viscous green liquid filled each one. “I think we got them all.”
“What is this supposed to be?” he asked primly.
“The souls. I figured you’d want them back. Tembo extracted them from the primary concoction. We’re working on parsing out the rest, but there are so many.” I sat back in my chair, reaching for the cup before remembering that it was empty. “Anyway. I hope you’re able to do something with them.”
Jakub looked fragile. He reached out for the rack and picked it up, his taloned hands clicking against the glass. His hand shook a little.
“You aren’t going to cry, are you?” I asked.
“There is no water in my body,” he said simply. “Thank you. I did not know what to expect from this meeting, after so many years, and such . . . violence . . . between our people.”
“That was different people. And as we’ve both learned, the Lumieres manufactured most of that drama.” My skin was beginning to crawl with all the mundanity, even in ancient and blessed Paris. I folded my napkin on the table and stood up. “Good luck. We won’t be bothering you. And if you ever need anything, you know where to find us.”
Jakub stood suddenly and, to my great terror, hugged me. I wasn’t wearing my armor, because even for Paris that seemed a little extreme, so the strength of his grip crushed the air out of my lungs and made my bones creak. I coughed for mercy into his ear. When he released me, he took a step back.
“You have my thanks, Sir John of Rast,” he said solemnly.
“Nothing to it.” I left him there with his family, feeling pretty good about myself.
Hopefully, nothing terrible would come from releasing vampires back into the world. Right?
Right?
Tim Akers, The Eccentrics (Knight Watch Book 3)
