Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) (42 page)

Cerise nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t get how Mara is doing this. A crypt that undead keep coming out of sounds like a portal to Hades, but there aren’t any of those near here. Unless maybe she found one that was blocked, and opened it?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said. “Let’s see where those directions lead.”

If I’d thought the upper catacombs were macabre, the lower levels were ten times worse. There the air was so thick it was hard to breath, and the bones were piled in careless heaps and drifts. Water trickled down the walls to form dark pools across the floor, some of which hid treacherous bone pits. Anyone but Cerise would have fallen into at least one of them.

Sound echoed and distorted strangely in the twisting passages. Sometimes we heard what might have been other parties marching through the depths, or it might have just been our own footsteps echoing back to us. We turned, and turned again, carefully checking and double checking to make sure we didn’t get lost.

Then we saw light up ahead, and stopped.

Cerise crept back from where she’d been leading the way, ten paces or so ahead of the rest of the group. “It’s coming from around that corner, to the left. That should be it.”

Corinna put her head next to Cerise, and the dryads all gathered around us. The air freshened, and the warm weight of two lean huntresses against my back somehow made the darkness seem less oppressive.

“We should rush them,” Corinna whispered. “Hit them hard, before they can respond to our presence.”

“Alright,” I agreed. “But stay together, and if we find an army of undead don’t rush into the middle of them. I have a lot of magic that can kill a whole mob of enemies all at once, but none of it can tell friend from foe.”

“If Mara is there, let me be the one to fight her,” Cerise advised. “Corinna, she’s a demigoddess with powerful fire magic, and she turns into a giant two-headed fox. She’ll burn your girls to ash if she gets the chance.”

The dryads all shuddered at that.

“We understand,” Corinna said seriously. “Don’t worry about us. Most of us fought against the Aesir when they marched on Olympus. We understand how to stay out from underfoot when titans clash.”

“If she tries to use my amulet I can turn it off,” I told them. “Otherwise I’ll keep her minions busy, make sure she can’t escape, and shoot at her if she gets out of melee.”

“You should be in the back, then,” Cerise suggested.

“That works,” I agreed. “Alright girls, let’s do this.”

We took our positions, and Cerise counted down from three. Then we rushed around the corner. We couldn’t actually run full tilt in those close quarters, but we could move pretty fast.

There were sentries in the corridor, but by the time I came around the corner they were already being mobbed by dryads. Cerise swept past them and through the doorway the undead had been guarding, with Corinna hot on her heels.

I rushed after her, cursing under my breath about the fact that my companions could all outrun me so easily. Apparently I needed some kind of mobility spell. Force magic on my boots, maybe? A thought for later.

The dryads abandoned the broken bones of the sentries they’d dismembered, and rushed through the doorway. I followed them in, and came to an abrupt stop.

There was a surprisingly large room, with a high vaulted ceiling of stone. The remains of another half-dozen skeletal warriors littered the floor around Cerise and Corinna, who had obviously just finished dispatching them. But there was no sign of Mara, or a portal, or anything else along those lines.

Instead, the middle of the room was occupied by the biggest skeleton I’d ever seen. Keeping in mind that I’ve been to museums that had dinosaur skeletons on display, that’s saying something. This thing’s skull was substantially bigger than a Tyrannosaurus, with two long horns behind the eye sockets and a shorter one rising from its snout. The ribs could have come from a whale, and the tail bones were laid out in an arc that must have been thirty feet long. But it was the wings that made it obvious what I was looking at.

“A dragon,” I said flatly.

Cerise nodded, looking around nervously. “There was a pulse of magic when I entered the room.”

A cold blue glow sprang up inside that vast skull, and spilled out to flow down the spine and into the cavernous rib cage.

“Ah, Mistress?” Corinna said hesitantly. “That doesn’t look good.”

“A dragon,” I repeated.

Bright blue pinpoints of light sprang up in the empty eye sockets. The skeleton stirred, and the head rose.

“That bitch animated a fucking dragon,” I groaned.

“I have returned,” the dragon said, in a voice that drove all warmth from the room. “After centuries of haunting the caves of Hades as a powerless wraith, my strength is returned to me. I am Varfin the Hungry, worms, and you shall be the first meal of my new life.”

              The great skeleton stirred, and rose to its feet.

              Intellectually I knew that it was much smaller than Narfing. But the dragon had a sheer presence that dwarfed anything I’d ever encountered. The dryads quailed, falling back before it, and even Corinna seemed paralyzed with fear. Its malevolent aura pressed hard against the protection of my newly-wrought coven bond, bleeding cold terror into my subconscious. For a moment all my magic was forgotten in the face of a foe I couldn’t possibly fight.

              Cerise was completely unaffected.

              She sauntered towards the dragon as the blue ghostlight poured over its bones, coalescing into tendons and gaunt, dead flesh. Her slender hips swayed with every step, and her long tail waved in the air behind her. Shadows crawled across her form like living things, and her demonic aura hung heavy in the air around her.

              “Greetings, Varfin,” she purred. “I am Cerise Black, High Priestess of Hecate. You should have refused Mara’s call, and stayed hidden in Hades. But you didn’t, and now I’m going to feast on your soul.”

              “No witch can kill a dragon,” Varfin scoffed. “Your stolen power has gone to your head, demonling. But I’ll happily kill you first.”

              It lunged with blinding speed, its bony snout coming down to smash her into the floor. But Cerise was even faster. She seemed to dissolve into the darkness for an instant, and reformed on top the dragon’s head.

              A silver dagger plunged into one of those gaping eye sockets. The dragon roared and shook its head, throwing her off. A trail of cold blue magic followed the dagger as Cerise tumbled across the room to land feet-first against a wall, but I couldn’t tell if it had done any real damage.

              Her gun spoke, but the bullet just bounced off the dragon’s skull. The dragon whirled towards her, and I shook myself. She couldn’t kill this thing alone.

              “Corinna!” I said urgently. “Pull back. You don’t want your girls in the room if it starts breathing fire.”

              She shuddered. “Mistress. W-we have to help her.”

              “Leave that to me.”

              I pulled my gun and spun the cylinder. Cerise was sparring with the thing now, darting in to land blows when she could, but she didn’t seem to be doing much damage. A sweep of the dragon’s tail grazed her, and sent her flying again.

              I fired an explosive round into the monster’s body.

              A ball of white-hot nickel-iron appeared for the briefest of instants where the bullet struck, before it exploded. The superheated metal blew a huge hole in the desiccated flesh that had begun to cover the dragon’s ribs, and I could see glowing blobs sinking into its bones. In the enclosed space the explosion was deafening, and dust rained down from the ceiling.

              The dragon whipped its head around, and vomited up a deluge of oily black flames.

              I pulled on my power tap, and threw up a wall of stone between us before the attack could reach me. The flames ate into the stone like acid, hissing and smoking, but it got the job done.

              I threw myself into the air, knowing that staying in one place for long would be deadly against a foe like this. Cerise had taken advantage of my distraction to attack again, and I saw tendrils of darkness twining around one of the dragon’s hind legs. It was turning to deal with her, so I stuck myself against the ceiling and fired twice more.

              The dragon roared in pain, though I could barely hear it over the ringing in my ears. For a moment I thought we had it. But then the dryads spilled back into the room’s entrance, locked in battle with a mob of skeletons. Damn it, this whole situation was a trap, wasn’t it? What else was going to go wrong?

              I didn’t have time to think about it, because the dragon broke free of Cerise’s spell and leaped at me. Unlike her my reflexes were merely human, and its bony snout slammed into me before I could react.

              “Daniel!”

              The distraction cost Cerise, as the dragon’s tail blurred around to smash into her. She sailed across the room, and slammed into the wall so hard that the stones cracked around her. Then the dragon was falling away from me, its jaws opening again as black flame filled it maw.

              My shield was down, but my coat had blocked even the multi-ton impact of the charging dragon. I frantically threw my earth talisman between us, and conjured a wall of stone in midair. Damn it, I needed to do better than this.

              Black flames licked around the edges of the barrier, but the enchantments on the stone kept it from being destroyed. I sent it flying at the dragon, and spared a moment to concentrate on myself. I needed to be faster, react quicker. Could my flesh magic do that?

Yes. The energy cost was huge, and I’d have to heal myself constantly to repair the damage the technique did. But right now I had more power than I knew what to do with. I dropped off the ceiling and wove the spell as I fell. Magic filled my limbs, and the world slowed down.

Cerise was still fighting. She wove across the floor flinging curses at the dragon, darts of shadowy energy that left black marks on ts pale hide. Her tail hung limp, and she left a trail of blood behind her, but she was alive. Thank god. I hadn’t been sure if even she was tough enough to survive that impact.

I threw myself across the room before I even touched the floor. The stone beneath the dragon’s feet turned to mud, and then back to stone a moment later. Varfin thrashed wildly, and the stone instantly cracked and began to give way.

But it gave me time to reach Cerise, and hand her Grinder.

“Now we’re talking,” she grinned. The howling blade came to life, and she rushed back into melee with the giant beast.

This time she had me supporting her, fouling the dragon’s movements with earth magic while she darted around it. I threw up walls and turned the footing to mud, made the floor sprout spikes and grew my earth talisman into a flying boulder to batter it.

But Varfin’s injuries healed almost as fast as we dealt them, and the undead monster was tireless. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Corinna and her dryads still locked in desperate battle against an endless horde of skeletons, where the dragon could cover them in black flames whenever it felt like it. The room itself was rapidly becoming unstable, chunks of earth and stone falling from the ceiling.

I needed a more effective weapon. But what? I didn’t dare set off bigger explosions than the ones my gun produced. I’d just bring the roof down on us, and I had no illusion that being buried would kill this thing. Any fire I could directly conjure would be too weak to be effective, and we were already running out of oxygen down here. The dragon’s bones were steeped in ancient magic, far too strong to easily destroy with force spells.

Magic. That was it.

I abandoned my latest attempt to pin the dragon’s tail under a mass of stone, and hammered a dispelling into its back. Normally that would have been a useless gesture, like trying to dissolve Hoover Dam with a beaker full of acid. But with my energy tap I could throw far more power into the spell than any normal mage.

The ghostly blue glow that stretched across the dragon’s wing bones flickered, and the beast staggered. Cerise took advantage of its distraction to rip a huge gash in its side with Grinder, and plunge one of her athames into the wound.

Alright, so its magic was armored against dispelling. That made sense, most enchantments were pretty tough in that respect. I shaped a different spell, slammed a spike of concentrated magic into its protections and began to pry them loose with sheer overwhelming brute force. Blue sparks crackled across the dragon’s hide, and it whipped around to breathe a gout of black fire at me.

Hah. I belted out another overpowered dispelling, and blew the magic of its breath weapon apart. The unnatural flame dissolved into broken bits of magic, intangible and too disordered to be any great threat.

“Mortal fool. You think you can overpower a dragon?”

Varfin reared up on his hind legs, with his wings spread wide. Ignoring Cerise’s attacks, he spread his jaws and unleashed a torrent of liquid black fire at me.

I countered the same way I had before, with a dispelling that tore apart the magic of his attack before it could reach me. But this time it didn’t end after a second. Instead it grew, more and more of the unholy flame rushing towards me. I planted my feet and drew deep on my power tap, pouring more energy into my dispelling.

My power stone was a machine that would never tire. I would, eventually, but I’d shaped spells at nearly this intensity for twenty minutes at a time when I built my stronghold. I doubted Varfin could keep up his attack for that long. So I gritted my teeth, and maintained the spell for the longest minute of my life.

Then Varfin’s attack collapsed, and he began thrashing wildly. My dispel washed over him, making his wings flicker again, and this time they kept flickering instead of recovering. A jet of violet plasma burned its way out of the dragon’s rib cage, and I realized Cerise had taken advantage of its distraction to actually cut her way inside its body. I could see the sharp outline of her aura deep inside the magic that animated the dragon’s bones, tearing it apart from the inside.

“Get… out of me… you parasite!”

Varfin thrashed wildly. His tail swept through the melee at the entrance to the chamber, sending dryads and skeletons alike tumbling across the floor. His magic seemed to convulse, streamers of blue energy erupting in all directions to orbit furiously around him.

Well, that was too good a distraction to waste. I retrieved my earth talisman, and formed it into a multi-ton mass of iron with a blade along the bottom. A little blunt, since the talisman’s shaping magic wasn’t precise enough to make a real razor edge, but I slapped a force blade over it to fix that. Then I flew it over the thrashing dragon, and waited for him to move to where I wanted him.

The giant guillotine fell, biting through the dragon’s long neck to bury itself in the floor.

Varfin went still for a split second. Then the blue glow exploded out of him with a violence that shook the room. More chunks of stone fell, and I glanced up to see the whole dome collapsing.

I rushed to the dragon’s body, where Cerise was just starting to cut her way free, and threw a banishment upwards.

“To me!” I shouted. “The room is collapsing. Everyone to me!”

The stones falling on my head dissolved into nothingness as my magic touched them. The nearest dryads reached me, but now the whole ceiling was coming down like a tsunami of hard stone. Corinna dove under a mass of loose earth, towing a wounded dryad behind her, and fell at my feet. Cerise looked around wildly, dissolved into shadows and reappeared next to me with a dryad in each arm.

The last dryad, the one I’d spoken with earlier, only made it halfway under my protection before the roof came down.

Again I held hard to a spell that pushed the limits of my ability to channel power. All around us the room was buried in solid earth and stone. More earth fell above us, trying to fill in the hole that protected us, but I banished it as fast as it could fall.

Finally the rumbling stopped. We were at the bottom of a steep funnel-shaped hole, with faint lights visible far above us.

“Alanna?” Corinna said worriedly, kneeling next to the half-buried dryad. From the way the stones lay on top of her it was obvious that she’d been crushed flat from the waist down.

“Back to my tree… for me,” the dryad said weakly.

I put my hand on her shoulder, and flooded her with healing energy. She gasped.

“Dying can’t be much fun, even if you do come back from it,” I said.

“It sucks,” she agreed. “Sorry, Corinna. I was too slow, and I’m all flat now. Can you… take me home?”

“Of course I will, Alanna. Do you have the strength to return to wood?”

She nodded. “Our lord is giving me lots of strength. Thank you, kind master.”

Her form wavered, and shrank into a green mist that curled up Corinna’s arm and coalesced into a wooden bracer.

“Well, that was something,” Cerise said weakly, leaning into my side. But somehow she didn’t feel as cuddly as usual. I looked down to find that she had scales now, of white and pale blue, and a stubby pair of leathery wings grew from her back.

“Looks like you sucked down a little too much dragon, there,” I told her.

She nodded. “Yeah. I’ll have to pass most of this off to Hecate in my next sacrifice. The power is nice, but I’m not keen on the scales. Corinna, what about the rest of your girls?”

I looked around, and realized that only six of the dryads were still with us. Damn.

“They’ll recover,” Corinna assured us. “Their spirits will return to their trees. But as weak as they were, it will be a week or more before they can manifest again. Unless our lord can heal them?”

“I’ll give it a try next time we have a free minute,” I told her. “But for now we’d better make sure the town is still going to be here come morning.”

There were sounds drifting down from above, and as I listened I realized it was a battle.