“We just keep finding ourselves like this, don’t we?” I said.
Bethany looked past me at Stryge. “Trent, hurry!”
My fingers grazed something inside the pocket, a long, thin, metallic object. I pulled it out. It was the same charm I’d seen her take out of the drawer at Citadel, the small metal tube topped with a beveled glass bead.
“Touch the glass to the lock,” she said, stepping back. “Gently,” she added.
I did. There was a sudden shower of sparks, and the door swung open. I ran into the cage and untied Bethany’s hands. Once she was free, she rushed to untie Gabrielle. I freed Philip and took the silver chain from around his neck, tossing it aside. He breathed a sigh of relief, rubbing the red marks it had left on his neck. Then he picked up Isaac, and ran like a blur for the stone slab blocking the exit. By the time the rest of us caught up to him, he had already laid Isaac gently on the ground and was trying to push the stone aside, but even his immense strength wasn’t enough to move it.
“Help me,” Philip said. “We’ve got to move this thing—”
A low rumble of a growl echoed through the chamber.
I froze, then turned around very slowly. We all did.
Stryge’s eyes were open. They burned like fires in their sockets—cold, white fires, the same as Gregor’s eyes. Maybe those were traits all Ancients shared, I thought, invincibility and freaky eyes. Then Stryge stood up out of the throne, effortlessly snapping the chains that bound him. His tusks had regrown to their full length. His vast wings unfolded from his back.
The last of the broken chains slid off his shoulders and crashed loudly to the floor at his feet. Then Stryge noticed us, and let loose an angry, deafening roar that shook the chamber’s walls.
“Guys,” I said, “I think we should run.”
Thirty-nine
Stryge charged, his enormous, clawed feet pounding the floor so hard it felt like the whole chamber would collapse. Philip slung Isaac’s unconscious body over his shoulder, and sped to the other side of the room. The rest of us scattered out of Stryge’s way. The Ancient slammed into the stone slab that covered the archway. The stone cracked, a long fissure that ran lengthwise from top to bottom, but Stryge himself was unharmed. He turned toward us, bellowing his rage.
We ran for the weapons. Bethany snatched up the Anubis Hand, Gabrielle grabbed her morningstar, and I picked up Philip’s broadsword. I shouted his name and tossed it across the chamber to him.
Philip moved quickly. He jumped for it, grabbing the sword in midair, flipped, and landed on Stryge’s back. The Ancient batted him with his wings, trying to knock him off, but Philip held on. He stabbed the sword into Stryge’s back, but the blade snapped, the tip shattering against the Ancient’s invulnerable hide and leaving Philip holding a hilt with half a blade.
Stryge pulled him off his back with one claw and tossed him away like a toy. The vampire struck the wall where the circles had been carved, and then tumbled to the floor, landing in the column of sunlight that streamed through the hole in the ceiling. He screamed as the sunlight touched his bare face, reflecting like spotlights in his mirrored shades. His skin reddened into boils and began to steam.
“Philip!” I shouted, but I couldn’t reach him. He was all the way on the other side of the chamber, and a pissed off, thirty-foot-tall Ancient stood between us.
Philip thrashed in pain. He covered his face with his gloves and managed to drag himself out of the light. He pulled his hood up to protect himself, tried to stand, and fell back down. After that, he didn’t move. I hoped he was still alive, but there was no way to tell how badly injured he was.
Bethany ran at Stryge, preparing to strike him with the Anubis Hand. He kicked her away. The staff flew from her hands as she tumbled through the air and landed hard, headfirst, against the wall near me. When she slumped over, I saw blood in her hair.
I picked up the Anubis Hand and gritted my teeth angrily. “All right, you ugly son of a bitch.” I ran at him, clutching the Anubis Hand so tightly my knuckles went hot. But before I had a chance to swing it, he knocked me aside with a single sweep of his enormous hand. The sheer force of the blow sent me sliding across the floor until my back hit the wall next to Philip. I winced in pain. Next to me, the vampire was curled on the floor, unconscious but still breathing. That was the good news. The bad news was that Gabrielle and I were the only ones left conscious to fight an enormous, unkillable Ancient, but she only had one good arm and I wasn’t feeling all that solid after Stryge’s backhand. Frankly, the odds sucked.
Gabrielle pointed her morningstar at Stryge. In my dazed state, I thought it a strange way to hold what was essentially a club. But she’d taken it from Isaac’s vault, and Isaac didn’t keep ordinary weapons in there, only magical artifacts. The spiked ball at the end of the morningstar began to glow, and a bright sunburst of light exploded from it, like a flashbulb going off directly in Stryge’s face. Stryge bellowed in rage, throwing one arm over his eyes and flailing angrily with the other. Apparently he didn’t like bright light any more than other gargoyles did. Disoriented and in pain, he stumbled and fell, crashing into the enormous stone slab a second time.
This time, the slab broke apart, crumbling into rubble under his weight and revealing the tunnel outside. Unfortunately, I was still too stunned to get up and run. But that didn’t mean Gabrielle couldn’t.
“The door’s open! Go!” I shouted to her. She didn’t listen. She blasted Stryge with more light from the morningstar. The Ancient roared in pain. As her confidence built, she moved closer to him, intensifying the light. Stryge shrieked in agony. One wing unfurled and, before Gabrielle saw it coming, it swatted her away. She flew backward through the air and slammed into the metal bars of the cage. She yelped in pain and dropped the morningstar.
Stryge stood up again. He didn’t look seriously injured, just a whole lot angrier than before.
Damn. We’d gone up against an Ancient and had our asses handed to us. What more could we do? There was no way to stop him. I wished I had Van Lente’s sword so I could at least cut off Stryge’s head again. It wouldn’t kill him, but I’d settle for dormant at this point.
Stryge towered above us as we lay injured and pathetic on the floor of his tomb. I thought for sure he would stomp us into hamburger, but the Ancient hardly took notice of us. Instead, he looked up at the ceiling. He took a deep breath, the sound like the rush of a waterfall, and his whole body swelled. The shadows seemed to gather around him, pulled from the corners of the chamber, flowing into him. Then he exhaled with a mighty roar, and a beam of dark red light exploded out of him, shooting up to the ceiling.
And through it.
The light, or whatever it was, broke effortlessly through the rocks and earth, raining stones and clods of dirt down into the chamber. I covered my head. Boulders crashed to the center of the room, smashing the throne to rubble and sending up a cloud of dust. I couldn’t see Bethany on the other side of the chamber anymore. I had no idea if she was alive or dead after the rockfall.
The chamber kept shaking. It felt like an earthquake, like the whole world was tearing itself apart. The red beam coming out of Stryge’s form continued shooting past the enormous hole it had blasted in the ceiling, rising higher and higher into the sky itself. The warring factions of gargoyles, so far up from where I lay that they looked like tiny black bats, scattered out of its path. Finally, the beam seemed to explode in midair. The blue sky turned dark with clouds that billowed out of nowhere. Red and black clouds, like nothing I’d ever seen before, roiling like an angry sea.
The strange beam disappeared, but the quaking didn’t stop. Stryge spread his wings and began to flap, lifting off the ground toward the hole he’d blasted in the ceiling.
No, I thought. I wasn’t going to let it be that easy for him.
I forced myself to stand, and ran toward him, scooping the Anubis Hand off the floor. It was hard to keep upright with the whole chamber shaking. I jumped and clung to the lower half of Stryge’s leg as he flew up toward the hole. Stryge roared at me, angry that my weight was throwing him off balance. He tried to kick me off. I held on for dear life with both arms wrapped around his enormous calf, trying not to fall, and trying not to let go of the Anubis Hand, either. Unfortunately, holding on this tight, I didn’t have the leverage to use the staff against him.
We rose to the top of the chamber. I looked down but couldn’t see the others through the dust in the air. I
