Black Moon Rising (DarkLife Saga) (20 page)

Looks like my brothers it was.  I looked past the Banshee and saw the small weapons launchers rising out of the dry ground.  Tam had activated the complex’s main defenses.  That wasn’t part of the plan either, but yay Tam!  For once I was grateful my brother was always of the opinion that there was no such thing as overkill. I did a quick count and saw four of the metal boxes, rotating
toward us.

The perimeter launchers were equipped with two small surface-to-air rockets and a mini-gun.  Both were strong enough to stop anything with a pulse and most things that weren't.  But I wasn’t about to kid myself into thinking they would have any effect on her.  When it came to defying death, the Harbinger would make Houdini look like a rank amateur.

The Banshee was so enamored with the sound of her own voice that she failed to notice the launchers.  By the time she did, rounds of ammunition were flying through the air.  I dropped, twisting and dodging the hail of bullets, but I wasn’t successful.

The gun was firing rounds faster than I could keep up with.  I was hit twice before I finally threw out a hand and erected a shield.  With all the energy I’d expended, it would be a miracle if I didn’t end up shot dead by friendly fire.

Spurts of leaves and dirt hopped into the air, displaced by bullets riddling the ground.  More than one struck the Banshee, causing her to jerk with each hit.  My eyes were transfixed on the wounds.  They never bled.  She didn’t shed a single drop of blood.  There wasn’t enough time for it.  As soon they pierced her skin, the pale flesh knit itself back together.

After getting hit a few more times, she turned with her mouth open.  She didn’t make a noise, but I could see the sounds emanating from her mouth.  There were small ripples hanging in the air before her.  The rounds struck her barrier and fell to the ground without doing any damage.  No, the rounds weren't going to kill her, but they did distract her enough for me to flash
toward the nearest tree.  Any cover was better than nothing at this point, and I needed to force these bullets out of me so that I could heal, if I could.  My body was damn near exhausted from healing my leg.

“I’m here, Val,” Irulan’s voice, called out to me.  I spared the shortest of glances, taking my eyes off the Banshee for a second and looked up.  There was my wife in all her fiery, Sidhe glory, dropping out of the sky.  Her waist-length crimson hair was swirled around her, and her green eyes churned with angry clouds.

She landed beside me and cocked an eyebrow.  “You ready, baby?”

With her by my side I was ready for anything.  I nodded as I felt the metal intrusions slip from my skin.  If Irulan saw, she never said so.  From the moment, my brothers and I arrived at the fence, till now, were no more than five minutes tops.  But as I watched the Banshee taking her sword to the weapons launchers, it felt like more time had passed.

“We need to move," I whispered.  “We’ve got about five hundred yards to cover before we reach the entrance to the Vault.”

“So we've got to scale the fence while avoiding her and the security system, and then make it across fifteen hundred feet of open area,” she replied.

“Yup.”

“No problem,” she said and dropped to her knees.  I watched in silence as Irulan thrust her hands into the earth.   “As soon as she falls, we scale the fence and run like hell.”

I peeked around the tree and saw the Banshee driving the blade of her sword into the last functioning launcher and frowned.  “There goes the last launcher for this sector.  What are...”

I was on the verge of asking Irulan what she was planning, but as I watched the Fae assassin ride the twisting weapons launcher, I noticed the ground ar
ound the silo, was beginning to crumble and fall into the vacant hole.

I looked at Ire, and I saw thin fissures in the
forming in ground.  They ran from her hands to the launcher, opening the earth like a fault had been there all along.  The destroyed weapon had shaken loose from its mooring and falling into the widening hole beneath it.  The Banshee struggled to free her sword and get clear, but the chasm was opening too fast.  With a loud screech and even louder scream, the metal base crumbled.  Both the launcher and the Banshee were swallowed by the falling earth.  Her scream continued, but it was muffled by the mounds of dirt that covered her.

“Move Val!” Irulan yelled beside me, as I stood there like a nut watching the pit get wider.  “She’s using her scream to dig herself out.  Without unbroken contact with the earth, I don't know how long I can keep up the shovel routine.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice.  Together we darted around the scattered trees and headed for the security fence.  “Shut ‘em down, Tam,” I yelled and projected at the same time.  We could jump the fence, no problem.  The lasers positioned along the top were a different story.

We were inches away from the fence, but I didn’t hear a thing from Tam.  Shit.  The Banshee’s screams were getting louder.  It was time for a leap of faith.  I bent my legs and pushed off.  Air whipped at my face as I flew upward.  I eyed the blinking lights on the battery packs and thought ‘red’.  Stay red, please stay red.  As long as those lights didn’t turn green, the lasers weren't powering up.

I cleared the fence and dropped to the ground with a sigh of relief and thanks.  He heard me.  Irulan touched down beside me, a sight more graceful, floating on her column of air than I had been.

“We’re heading around back, to the far left of the grounds,” I pointed.  The Banshee’s wail was no longer subdued.  I jerked around and saw her climbing out of the hole, her silver hair streaked with clumps of dirt.  With the moon high in the sky, I had no problem seeing the expression on her pale face.  The witch was pissed.

“I’m going to save you for last,” she yelled, shaking free chunks of sod.  Her chest rose as she took a deep breath; then she unleashed hell.  Her wail hit the fence, totally obliterating the metal poles and links, as far as I could see.  Without anything standing between us, she charged forward.

“Faster, Ire,” I croaked.  Since feeding from FaeVar I’ve gotten a lot faster.  I can outrun a Mustang doing one twenty and hold that speed for thirty minutes without breaking a sweat.  Right now as far as I was concerned that wasn’t fast enough.

“Shields Val!” Ire yelled, as she ducked under a tree branch.

“I don't think I can,” I gasped.  Between giving Ire blood, all the healing I’d done, and the stunts I’d pulled to lure the Banshee into following me, I was
quickly depleting my cache of energy.  When I ran out of juice, I’d be forced to feed. Now was so not the time for me to grab a quick bite.

Irulan stopped running and threw herself in from of me.  She raised a shield large enough to cocoon the two of us and not a moment too soon.  The Banshee let loose a volley of wails that tore the ground apart around us.  She hammered the shield with so much force that Ire’s arms shook from the strain of maintaining it.

“I need some help, Val,” she said through clenched teeth.  I held out my hand and tried to shape the remaining energy inside of me into something solid, but it was no good.

“I can't,” I croaked.  Any abilities that I’d gained since taking Irulan’s blood were closed off.   “I don't have it in me.”

“You’ve got it, Val.  We just have to find it.”  Irulan dropped her glamour.  The rose colored, crimson-haired facade that she normally projected fell like a curtain being swept away.  In its place was a woman made of fire.  Her red hair swirled with flames.  The light, rose-colored tones of her skin had darkened in shade.  And she was glowing as if a bonfire had been lit under her skin.

Sidhe are born with one base-glamour firmly intact.  Manipulating glamour is second nature to the Fae.  But dropping it completely to reveal their true forms underneath, I’ve found out, is a learned skill.  Some Sidhe, less powerful ones, went their entire lives without dropping their glamour completely.  The ones that can don't make a habit of doing so, unless the situation called for the extra energy used to maintain the glamour.  I can count on one hand, the number of times I’ve seen Irulan in her true form.

She is a sight to behold, but something was different.  Her green eyes void of pupils and swirling with tiny storm clouds, complete with lightning, locked on my own.  She stared at me with an intensity that I hadn’t seen in her eyes since our first visit to the FaeLands together.  But there was also a sense of unfamiliarity in her stare.  She looked at me like she was staring at a stranger.  Before I could process the reasoning behind her gaze, a stabbing pain lodged itself in the center of my head.

The world around me came alive in a way that it never had before.  I was reading everyone inside the complex whether I wanted to or not.  Every thought, every feeling, and stray emotion, rammed into me with the force of hurricane.  I tried to pull back, but only succeeded in throwing my awareness farther away from me.  I touched the minds of the reporters camped out at the outskirts of our property and even farther.

I jumped into the mind of a mother at a bakery in NoDa, telling her son that he couldn’t have another muffin.  I slipped into the thoughts of a man singing to himself as he walked through Concord Mills Mall.  I was a baby crying after having a bad dream, and a teenaged girl thrilled with herself for finding the courage to sneak out and meet her delinquent boyfriend.  I was everyone and no one, because all the things that made me Valeria were lost to the hundreds of voices inside my mind.  I fell forward, clutching the sides of my head.

“What the hell,” I moaned.  “Ire, what did you do?”  I struggled to push all of the extra voices out of my head.  Little by little I shoved away every individual mind, until I was only reading my family.  Their familiar thoughts calmed me enough that I was able to turn my attention to what was going on around me.  I forced myself to look up at Ire.

The faraway look that filled her eyes seconds earlier had faded.  She frowned, and I saw that I looked like shit.  There was a wild look in my eyes, and my hair was singed in places.  How the hell did my hair get singed again?  Oh yeah, the fence.  Furthermore, why in the hell was I looking at myself from the outside?  I squeezed my eyes closed and sighed.

When I opened them, I could still see myself as if I were looking in a mirror instead of at the world around me.  With the opening of my eyes also came an understanding.  I was seeing myself through Irulan’s eyes.  We were linked, closer than we'd ever been.

She thought the same thing.  I received the notion faster than she conceived it.  I was about to ask her how, but she shook her head.  She didn’t know.  I knew without her saying or fully thinking, the answer to a question that I didn’t have time to project.  We were finishing one another’s thoughts faster than we could think them.

I read Tam’s frustration, coupled with Valerian’s abject terror that something was going to happen to me, and I pulled back my awareness.  I slipped out of my twin's thoughts and almost choked when I realized he didn’t feel my presence.  Valerian was the one person that I could never hide from.  We were too close.  Now I breached his shields and read him without notice. 

Our joining had boosted my natural abilities.  Then there were our other gifts.  Those granted to me by the Sidhe blood that ran through my veins.  The combination of our energies felt like someone had shoved a power line up my ass.

Another wolf leapt through the air
toward the Banshee.  He never got close.  The ripples of a wail rolled through the air and struck him in the underbelly, not only knocking the wind out of him, but throwing the pony-sized werewolf off course.  He flipped through the air out of control, toward me and Irulan.  With our minds linked as they were, our movements were automatic, mirror images of one another’s.  Together we threw a shield and caught the werewolf in mid-air before he could hurt us or himself.

Marcus shot by us and grunted his thanks as his subordinate tumbled down the firm shield, to the safety of the ground.  His breathing was deep and labored.  When he was close enough, I reached out and caught the pony-sized wolf as carefully as I could.  I eased him down, his face screwed with pain.  The impact did some damage, but at least he was alive.  He was out until his accelerated healing kicked in.  By my count that made three wolves that were now out of the fight.  That left four Manticores, two weres, and me and Irulan.  We were so close to the entrance to the Vault.  I just had to get past her and inside.  I searched the area, looking for anything that we could use as a distraction, but there was nothing.  A cool breeze lifted a strand of hair, and I glanced up.

It looks like we had something after all.  Fazion was circling high above us in his massive dragon form.  I’ll be damned if he wasn’t about to save our asses for a second time.  Who would have thought it?  The instant Fazion’s image popped into my head; Irulan received it also.  In a few seconds, she had a plan.  I caught the thought and nodded.  It would work.  The Banshee could deflect energy based attacks as fast as I could absorb them.  She could also deflect projectiles, whether they are bullets or a flying fist.  But just because she could deflect them, that didn’t make her impervious to them.  We’d proven that.  If she was distracted and didn’t have enough time, she was as vulnerable to physical attacks as I was.

I heard the clang of metal and looked up to see two Manticores swinging their swords
toward the Banshee.  She met their blows with her own blade and pushed them away.  Marcus darted in from behind her and in a move no natural wolf would ever make, let his body fall sideways, into a roll.  His roll took him close enough to clamp his powerful jaws around the Banshee’s leg.  We were rewarded with her first cry of pain.  She dropped to one knee, fending off the Manticores with one arm.  With the other, she reached inside her tunic and pulled something free.