Viper Moon (36 page)

Elise bent over me. “Only a minute now.”

Her breath smelled foul and tainted as if she’d been eating carrion along with the sewer monsters. Vic’s face was grim—and determined.

Only a minute
.

Time, the conjunction. I, who never had a purely psychic thought, could suddenly sense the universe around us. My grandfather repaired watches, not digital, but the old mechanical kind. Once he showed me the gears and how they inched along, larger, smaller, all meshing together to make a tiny, well-ordered machine. Like the watch, the universe, the stars, the multitude of worlds—all aligned, moved in time on a scale beyond belief. How amazing. Were I not in such a desperate situation, I might’ve enjoyed it.

There would be no rescue. Flynn didn’t know where I was. Michael might’ve known, but he was most likely dead. Dacardi had his son and he would be long gone.

The plaza lay silent except for the hiss of the gas torches and the grim sound of physical stress as I struggled against Vic and he held me down.

I wasn’t afraid, at least not for myself. I’d already died once; maybe this time it wouldn’t hurt as much.
Flynn
. . . Ah, best not think of him. My time with him, so sweet, had passed. I still had to fight. It is not in my nature to surrender to the inevitable.

Vic held me down with his arm across my chest. I twisted against him.

“Hold her head.” Elise stared down at me. Her crazy eyes narrowed and a look of stunning rapture came over her face.

Vic slapped one hand on my forehead, but he kept my chest pinned down.

Elise glanced toward the clock. She leaned forward. Couldn’t she see it? Maybe her eyes were bad. The timing had to be precise, I’d bet. Why did
she
need the clock? If I could feel the movement of time, the precision of the moment, a witch should have been able to sense the same. Whatever power she’d had, I’d bet her trip to conceive Michael had drained it away. They’d kill me, but if I could slow things down, get past that optimal time, I might change the outcome of this monstrous event.

The clock on its barrel was at my feet, which Vic stupidly hadn’t tied. Elise walked past my knees, my ankles. She peered, squinty-eyed, at the clock. She turned back.

As she did, I used Vic’s arm across my chest as leverage, jerked one leg back hard and fast, and slammed my foot into her chest. A good, solid hit that I prayed had broken something. It would have if I’d had my full strength. She went flying back out of my sight.

Vic jammed his arm over my chest and his other arm twisted and wrenched my hair. I lashed back up at him with my knee, but he easily evaded it.

Elise was on her feet. Howling like a wolf, she raced toward me with the knife upraised.

Stupid woman. She took the same path.

I kicked her in the face.

When I did, Vic’s grip loosened. I brought my knee up against the side of his head. He barely winced.

Elise returned. Blood ran from her nose and mouth, and she bared broken teeth—but she avoided my feet.

Gunfire, heavy caliber, and the roar of engines sounded in the distance. The clamor echoed from the hollow, abandoned buildings and danced away down the deserted streets. The cavalry to the rescue—but they would never arrive in time.

Elise raised the knife. Slow motion, like in the movies.

The blade started down.

A single shot cut the night. A crack, a whine overhead, so close—some hero was racing ahead of the main battle. Elise suddenly froze, the knife suspended above me. She twisted. Her eyes wildly searched the area around her.

Vic straightened to look, too. The idiot released some of the unremitting pressure on my body. I whipped my legs up, caught one around his neck at the knee. I used the other for a scissor lock on his head. He staggered backward, his hands clawing at my legs. I had him tight and wasn’t going to let go. Damn! Little rat stayed on his feet.

I hung upside down, my head banging on his knees. If I had been in his position, I would have dropped to the pavement, which might have loosened my grip. I would have leaned forward, grabbed my captive by the hair, and banged her head against the concrete block altar.

Not Vic. Vic the weasel, Vic the traitor wasn’t a warrior. He kept staggering backward across the pavement, out of the pentagram, hands desperately trying to tear my legs loose. He tripped over something, a pothole or curb, and we both crashed down. I immediately released him and rolled away toward the black edges of the plaza. I was beyond pain at that point. Across the damp pavement were water-filled potholes—better a monster eat me than this.

Vic seized me by the hair. I screamed and cursed as he hauled me back. I’d left a good layer of exposed skin on the asphalt.

“You won’t ruin this for me, Cassandra. Not after all I’ve done.” Vic snarled the words through rigid, clenched teeth. I kicked at him again, trying to trip him, but I’d taught them both to be wary of my legs. He dragged me through the bloody pentagram to the altar.

“On the altar!” Elise screamed.

“Damn the altar,” Vic shouted back. “She’s in the pentagram—that’s all he needs.”

He rolled me over on my stomach, jammed his knee into my back, and pinned me tight. He caught my hair again and jerked my head back so she could slit my throat.

A movement caught my eye. Nefertiti! She slithered across the plaza at incredible speed, over the asphalt, and through the bloody pentagram line.

Vic saw her, too.

His first reaction was the usual human reaction to a snake. He jumped up, desperately backpedaled. He tripped and fell, then scrambled to rise. He froze on his knees. His eyes bulged and his hands waved as if that would stop her. Nefertiti coiled. Her head darted forward. Fangs snapped into his cheek.

Vic howled a high-pitched wail of pain and terror. Nefertiti drew back and struck again. She nailed his throat.

This time, he acted. He caught her body in one hand, her head in the other. With the strength given a terrorized, dying man, he tore her head from her body.

I gasped. He’d just killed my friend, my protector. He’d cut a part out of my soul. I felt her die. Her presence in my mind, the power that let me communicate with her, faded as she returned to the Mother. Loss and sorrow consumed me, so powerful was that pain that I couldn’t find a way to give it voice.

I might have wallowed in silent agony and allowed Elise to cut my throat then, but words echoed in my head:
Nefertiti’s sacrifice, you fool. Don’t waste it.

I forced myself to roll out of the pentagram again until a curb stopped me. I couldn’t go on. I could barely raise my head to look back.

Vic still knelt, his eyes bulging. Nefertiti’s body twisted and whipped in death spasms beside him. He held her head in his hand and lifted it near his face. His mouth worked as if speaking to his killer. Elise had stopped to stare at him. Her face had a look of total incomprehension.

Like the monster in the subway tunnel, he gave one cry. His body jerked and shivered as he vomited blood across the pavement, a red stream that appeared black in the torchlight. He stiffened and toppled over.

The distant chatter of gunfire and roar of engines came closer.

Did I dare hope for rescue? Would they come soon enough?

Elise suddenly had me by my shirt. She dragged me back into the pentagram.

“Get away from her!” The shout came from across the plaza. Flynn! Flynn had come for me.

Elise stared at him. Flynn rushed to me, pistol pointed straight at her. At this distance he couldn’t miss.

“Drop the knife.” He used his cop voice, filled with command.

Elise hesitated. She glanced down at me, then back at him.

“The knife,” Flynn demanded again.

Elise straightened, but didn’t let go of the knife. She stepped away, lifted her arms. “You wouldn’t shoot an old woman. Not the Wolf, the Guardian.” She moved farther, too far to strike me. Slowly, step by step.

He kept the gun trained on her, but he knelt by me.

What was she up to? Her face was pinched and calculating.

Elise bolted. She rushed to the altar.

“Flynn, stop her!” I screamed, but it was too late, even if he had been capable of shooting a woman he didn’t perceive as a danger to anyone.

The planets, the stars, the gears of the universe clicked into place like my grandfather’s watch.

Elise bent over the concrete blocks.

“Mother!” Michael suddenly raced into the plaza. I heard a child’s desperate cry in his voice. “
Please, no!
”

She didn’t hear him. No hesitation. She jerked the knife up and slit her own throat.

Her eyes popped open and her lungs drew one last, choking breath. She collapsed facedown as her desperately beating heart pumped great spurts of blood across the concrete block. She’d completed the ceremony. She’d made a powerful offering on the moonless night, at the appropriate time. What would happen now?

Flynn holstered his gun, then grabbed me, lifted me, and held me in his arms. His breath was ragged in my ear as he said my name. A bleak-faced Michael used his knife to cut the cord holding my completely numb hands. He hadn’t gone to Elise. There was nothing to be done for her. To my surprise, Dacardi stood, too, his rifle ready. He stared at Nefertiti’s still writhing body.

I wanted to cling to Flynn, but my fingers wouldn’t work. I cried, mostly in physical pain, but more in gratitude that all three were there with me. I tried to form words to say
Thank you,
and to Flynn,
I love you,
but my tongue didn’t work, either.

Michael stared at the body of his mother sprawled across the crude altar. “I tried so hard,” he said softly. “I thought she was safe at Avondale.”

A sound came, a whooshing noise, as if someone had flipped on a giant vacuum cleaner. A jet-black cloud formed over Elise’s body and the bloodstained concrete block. The cloud hummed and flickered with red lightning. Still closely attuned to the workings of the universe, I knew what was happening.

The door between worlds opened into a great cavern of space where indefinable, sentient things lived. The stars disappeared and the midnight sky swirled with a prism of color. Images, shapes, some humanlike, others horrific . . .
Mother . . . God . . . help me.
They were aware of me—and were curious. Curious about me, about this world. These things were beyond conception.

Terrified, I swallowed the nausea that suddenly twisted my stomach, but my skin crawled. They faded away. I am the Earth Mother’s child. Things, creatures beyond this world should never be seen by mortals, humans like me.

The cloud over Elise remained. Lightning that cut like sharp knives grew brighter and a foul, stinking wind burned our eyes.

A scream began. It sounded far away at first, but grew ever closer, undulating and filled with incredible fury. The cry grew louder, as if someone was falling from a great distance.

The black cloud disappeared and a man dropped on the altar, seemingly from nowhere. He bounced hard in a wet slap of Elise’s blood and rolled off onto the plaza pavement. That fall would have killed a human.

We stood frozen in fascination.

The man lay on the pavement for a few seconds, moving slowly. He stiffly forced himself to his feet. Man? A loose description, but I had no other words. He was naked, with burnt gold skin and incredible hair—hair not blond like Michael’s, but red as my own. He stood, smeared with the blood of sacrifice, tall, powerful, and fantastically masculine.

He had Michael’s wonderful face, but his eyes burned bright, filled with deadly rage.

The Darkness had entered the Barrows in person.

The Darkness stared at Elise’s body on the altar. She was gone, though, free of his dominion. He turned to us—to me. That gaze bore down like a speeding car.

“Huntress.” His voice was far more compelling than Michael’s. “There are windows in my world and I’ve watched you.” The Darkness raised his hand and beckoned me. “You’ve cleaved your way through my servants, stealing away children who would grow strong for me. You’ve left me with a madwoman and her equally mad son to do my bidding. Come, Huntress. I won’t let you live.”

I stepped toward him, my body willing to obey that command and my mind shrieking at me to stop. Flynn grabbed my arm and yanked me behind him. I started to jerk away when Michael stepped in front of both of us.

“No.” Michael stood firm.

The Darkness laughed, laughter filled with irony and mockery, not humor. “Ah, my imperfect son. If you had half the Huntress’s courage. You cannot stop me. I will kill all of you.”

And he could. Somehow, I doubted our precious bronze would work on him.

A dreadful, gut-wrenching force suddenly roiled inside of me. Something akin to electricity flashed across my eyes. I crashed to the pavement on my hands and knees. Pain consumed me, suffocated me. I shrieked as white-hot fire blazed along every nerve in my body.

The Darkness was killing me.

No, this was something different, something more familiar. This torment had a name.

Flynn grabbed me, but I flung myself away, beating him with my hands. How much more pain could I take without going as crazy as Elise? Finally, that hideous, corroding agony burst out of me like Elise’s sacrificial lifeblood had spurted over the makeshift altar.

I lay choking and convulsing on the pavement as the night filled with the brilliance of a full moon. Michael, Flynn, and Dacardi hovered over me, but kept their eyes averted from her radiance.

“What’s happening?” Flynn asked.

“The Mother,” I moaned. “She’s here.”

Every inch of my body quivered and protested the abuse. I had a good idea what she’d done, though. The Earth Mother had hidden inside of me to enter the Barrows and confront the Darkness. Something she couldn’t do on her own without breaking the ward that she held to keep the Barrows a prison. Shit, I hated her.