The three others backed away as the demon put down the massive pack he had slung across his back. A horse leg fell out of the top to land on the dusty road.
The red monster with the massive teeth and heavy armor let slip a bellow of might and swung the blade in a whistling arc at the gargantuan two-paneled door that dwarfed the creature and its sword. The steel bit deep and sank into the clear material with a deep ringing sound. Kalandar grunted and wrenched the sword free. A hollow slash remained. He swung again, and again, and once more, carving a chunk out of the doorway large enough to shove his arm through. The automated system holding the door closed strained to do its job, but the writing was being hacked into the wall one slash at a time. He stepped back in approval of his own work, then returned to his vicious assault on the building’s entrance.
“We’ll be through in minutes,” Timtar said as his father raged at the machinery.
Above, the bright blue flashes and the thunder they cast off grew more frequent and intense, like white blood cells rushing to the site of an infection.
Sebastian jumped off the top of the city’s glassine wall just as one of the sun-bright blue bolts of power came down from the clouds. It hit where he had been standing with enough force to utterly obliterate the wall top. The explosion tossed the monster forward like debris in a hurricane, smashing Sebastian off the side of the nearest building. Several of his arms and legs snapped from the impact, and when Sebastian hit the ground, more of his body broke.
He growled in pain, but stood on broken limbs. They would heal—he could feel them knitting back together already, like itches deep within his bones—but he didn’t want to wait. He could hear…life. Over the roar of the storm’s wind, he could hear the sounds of someone trying to enter a building nearby. The loud grunts of exertion were followed by smashes and hollow ringing.
“Thistle my dear!” he roared into the nearing frenzy of the storm. “I come to feast on your flesh!”
He surged into the bowels of the necropolis, sure of his prey’s proximity.
“Did you hear that?” Derrick asked. “Was that your sister’s name?”
“It was,” Arridon answered as he lowered himself down to his knees. He undid the knots holding the rope fast and let Derick down to the ground with care. “That’s the bastard who chased us to the portal. Sebastian. I thought we killed him. I mean…I watched him die.”
Kalandar turned in the direction of the howl, and set his feet. He raised his sword for battle, and snarled in eager fury. “Should’ve killed him a bit more, it would seem.”
“What do we need to know?” Tim asked Arridon as he produced a sleek weapon resembling a pistol, but made out of fine, deftly interwoven branches. Instead of a hollow barrel to point, the weapon had a flower blossom at its tip.
“He’s big, strong, has armor made of bone. His blood is infectious. Get it on you, and you’ll be turned into one of the demons of the Bleed.”
“Being a demon isn’t the worst thing that you can be,” Kalandar said. “There are fates far less desirable.”
“Then whatever it turns you into, is one of those shittier fates,” Arridon said. He produced his own weapon from his waist.
“The poison of his blood gives me no pause. Let him come,” the demon snarled. “And we will show this monster how to lose a battle.”
Lightning struck the building across the street high above, shattering the windows with a cacophony of noise.
35
EO
Derrick crawled on the ground to the entrance Kalandar had hacked open with his enchanted propeller. On hands and knee (just one knee, as the other leg ended in a stump just above where he’d had a second knee), he moved to get out of the way of the imminent, awful battle.
How his stump wasn’t incapacitating him with full-body pain he couldn’t explain. The medicines and spells Timtar brought to bear on him must’ve been real potent, and real powerful. Other than the consistent background sensation that his leg was still there, he was perfectly comfortable. He didn’t even remember the moment Oldros’ shot had sheared it off.
He’d remember what was about to come though, the boy from Earth’s moon knew that.
He suddenly realized Kalandar was staring at him.
“You’re a halfbreed like your sister, Sam, aren’t you?” the towering monster wearing gleaming armor asked.
“I don’t know what halfbreed really means,” Derrick said.
“The child of a god and something else. Your powers aren’t awakened. While it may be dangerous to awaken them on short notice before a battle, a wildcard only I can play is better than no wildcard at all.” The demon leaned forward and, after shifting his sword to the other hand, extended a single finger which terminated in a long and razor sharp black nail.
Derrick couldn’t move as the talon’s tip pierced his forehead.
Whatever meds and magic Timtar had given Derrick for his leg did fuck all to stop the shattering, spine-shaking pain that one large claw did to the skin above his brow.
Derrick had been electrocuted once, back on the moon. He was young; six, maybe seven, and he was playing around with a fork near an electrical outlet. Seemed like a sensible experiment at the time. He came to a few seconds later, his sister Sam hovering over him, panicked and screaming.
Sam wasn’t here this time, but when Derrick came to, there was definitely yelling, and a whole lot of chaos.
Arridon watched as something alien stormed around the corner of a building just a hundred yards distant. It wasn’t Sebastian—at least, not the same Sebastian he remembered from House Frost in the Endless City—but it was still the same entity. A sick, wretched familiarity was there, and when
