“Your wish is my command, Master,” she said, her tone as acidic as her magical mist.
Isu knelt down next to the hinge and aimed her hands at it. Only a weak dribble of yellow mist trickled from her palms.
“What?” she gasped. “What did that scrawny little beggar do to me? What did you do to me?”
“I thought as much,” I said with a nod. “This herb suppresses magical abilities.”
Before we could say anything else, a piercing shriek ripped through the air.
“A harpy!” Grast yelled. “Take cover! Everyone take cover!”
I looked up and saw a winged creature in the sky. It was a mile or two up, but it was swooping down rapidly. It was much bigger than any bird I’d ever seen.
“You can deal with this on your own,” Isu muttered to me. “You’ve just robbed me of my powers.” She turned and ran back to the wagon, leaving me and Cranton alone in the field.
Elyse and Rami raced out of the wagon, their weapons at the ready. Fang bounded over to me, staring up at the sky and rumbling out a threat at the approaching harpy. Cranton, however, simply screamed like a little girl and continued sprinting blindly through the field.
It was the first time I’d seen a harpy, yes, but there was another first too: the first time I’d ever been turned off by a pair of perky tits.
The harpy was easily the size of an ox and had the torso of an attractive woman, but below was a pair of scale-covered legs, halfway between human and bird. Its eagle-like feet sported powerful toes for grabbing prey from above, while its long talons were designed for piercing flesh. Instead of arms, a pair of batlike wings bloomed from its shoulders. The harpy’s head was more monster than human, featuring an elongated jaw and a hinged mouth filled with stacked, crooked fangs. A bright and colorful crest of feathers rose up from its bald scalp like an elaborate headdress.
“I’ll handle this abomination,” Elyse said.
Sunlight bathed her in a shining aura, and she uttered a prayer of supplication to the Lord of Light. Instantly, golden plate armor covered her, and the mace she held doubled in size. She aimed the transformed weapon at the swooping harpy, but before she could blast it with her holy fire, it let out an ear-splitting shriek.
It felt like someone had smashed two steel spikes deep into my ears and used them to scrape the insides of my skull. My blood was turned to icy water, and my muscles locked up while my joints froze.
The harpy’s magic was paralyzing me.
I pushed back the agony and drew on every ounce of strength I possessed. With my hand shaking violently, I reached down, inch by tortuous inch, trying to wrap my fingers around Grave Oath’s hilt. If I could just get my fingers on the dagger, I could draw on the power of death and fight this beast’s magic. The task was no small feat. Simply reaching down and gripping the dagger felt like rolling a cave troll-sized boulder up a mountain.
I could hear the harpy’s wings beating the air and feel the wind coming off them. It was almost upon me.
My fingertips finally touched Grave Oath’s hilt, and a different kind of cold coursed through me. This was a cold I now knew as comforting, as empowering. The dry, dusty, bone-numbing chill of death.
In a sliver of a second, the souls inside my dagger empowered me and expelled the harpy’s curse from my body. I was free to move again. Just in time to dive away from the monster’s grasping toes and talons. The harpy screamed again, frustrated that her prey had slipped her grasp.
This time, her scream didn’t paralyze me. Holding Grave Oath while its captured souls flowed through me had made me immune to its magic. Everyone else, though, was frozen solid, completely paralyzed, and easy pickings for the vicious beast. Even Fang and the zombie Crusaders were paralyzed.
With its huge wings beating the air and flattening the long grass of the field, the harpy raced toward the next closest target: Cranton.
“Not on my watch, you bat-winged bitch,” I said.
I pulled out two throwing stars and scraped the herb off the trap onto their points, taking care not to get any on my fingers. The herb would negate the stars’ necrotic magic, but I didn’t need them for that. After the projectiles were sufficiently coated, I sprinted for the harpy as it prepared to snatch Cranton like a hawk diving for a hare.
As it plunged at him, I hurled the two throwing stars. One projectile slammed into the side of the harpy’s neck while the other buried itself in the creature’s ribs. The harpy screamed and veered around, turning its attention away from Cranton and toward me.
“You might have thought you were fucking with a mere mortal, you ugly sow,” I said, “but you picked the wrong field to hunt in today. I’m about to make you wish you’d stayed in your shit-stinking nest.”
The harpy tried to let out a paralyzing scream, but the herbs from the throwing stars were already working. All that emerged from the beast’s fanged mouth was a strangled gargle. It hovered in the air for a moment, both furious and confused, its wings beating a pulsing rhythm like distant drums. Then, it attacked, diving with its talons outstretched.
I had my kusarigama in my hands now, and as it swooped toward me, I darted forward. The harpy’s feet grasped for me, but I dropped down and slid under them. I drew strength from five of my skeletons and channeled it through the bone-chain of the kusarigama before I looped it over the diving harpy’s neck like a lasso.
The chain snapped tight around its neck, and I rolled as I slid, coming up into a standing position. I dug my heels into the ground and
