Each step added to the eerie nightmare as a ghost of a woman ran through the seething mass of sorcery-enhanced killers. In all her years as a Torch, Lyssa had never experienced anything like it.
Ryan was right. Destroying the army would ensure the safety of the nearby populations, but they didn’t need to repeat this whole annoying experience six months from now in a new location. The robed bastard was going down, and the Society would pry the truth from his lips one way or another.
Sprinting hard, Lyssa barreled past monsters, shoving them to the side. They tried to jump after the dangerous shadow in their midst, only to be swept up in the advancing tide of their kindred. She vaulted over an acid-spitter to arrive at the secret passage.
Shallow stairs led into a curved tunnel. She didn’t sense any worrisome sorcery that might mark a trap.
Lyssa wondered if the self-destruction shard had been a bluff. The man had had a way of escaping but kept trying to force them to retreat. Perhaps he’d found facing death harder than he’d expected. She’d have to ask when she found him—after punching him a few times.
She bounded down the stairs and into the tunnel after the robed man. His heavy footsteps echoed from ahead, and the grade of the path increased sharply. The tunnel began to brighten, and she could make out the man’s outline in the distance. Lungs burning, Lyssa closed on him, feeling like she was running up the side of a mountain. There was no way she’d let him get away.
No monsters had run into the tunnel, so she dropped her wraith form. She didn’t fire her guns, unsure of her accuracy at this distance and angle.
Ryan had been right. They needed to know who the robed man served. This wasn’t done yet. She wasn’t done.
Yelling like a barbarian, Lyssa charged up the path. It became clear the light she was seeing was sunlight streaming in from outside. She was almost back on the surface, which meant possible vehicles.
The robed man cleared the tunnel ahead of Lyssa. She emerged seconds later. Bright light forced her to squint, and her eyes took a moment to adjust. For all her ease in the dark, bright sunlight wasn’t her friend. Precious seconds ticked away, marked by her heavy breathing.
Waves of sorcery crashed over her like a tightening vise, slowing her as she stumbled over the ground and fell to her knees. When she could finally see, she realized she’d emerged from the side of a hill, with the main mine entrance off in the distance. The ground rumbled, and an earsplitting crackling noise filled the air.
Maybe he hadn’t been bluffing after all.
Lyssa shook her head, trying to concentrate and figure out the immediate situation. The deputies’ cars were all gone, disappearing into the distance.
That was good. They had understood when they were outclassed. That lowered the chance of collateral damage.
Her target stood not far from the exit, holding a tuning fork in front of him. Swirling, twisting lines of bright white rippled from the ground and converged on the tuning fork, the source of the crackling. They all were coming from the same area.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lyssa shouted, pointing her guns at him.
“Starting the future,” the robed man cried. “You’ve forced this.”
“This is over,” she yelled. “Give it up. Don’t you get it? You’ve lost.”
“Do what you feel is necessary for you, and I’ll do what it is necessary for me.”
Lyssa gritted her teeth. Blasting him with ablative rounds at point-blank range would kill him, and she didn’t have time to mess around. She ejected a magazine and loaded normal ammo. The man ignored her as she lined up her gun and kneecapped him with two quick shots.
He yelped and fell forward, still clutching the tuning fork. She advanced on him, now pointing her gun at his head.
“Give it up,” she shouted. “I will kill you. The only reason you’re still alive is that I need information, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll continue breathing. You know my reputation, and you know I’m willing to kill two-legged monsters as well as the four- and six-legged kind.”
“You’re too late.” The man groaned and dropped the tuning fork. The white energy streams ceased.
Lyssa didn’t know what was happening, but the sorcery pressure and the brightness pointed to something big. Heart pounding, she tried to think of something—anything—she could do.
Tremors shook the ground. The energy streams ripped into the earth, opening large cracks. A jagged scar ripped the ground open, the same overwhelming sorcery suffocating the area.
“They said to wait until Halloween,” the robed man shouted in a gleeful voice. “But it still worked. I thought it wouldn’t. I thought we need more life sources, but it’s working! Oh, my master’s plans aren’t ruined!”
The ground shook again, and a hill began to rise from the scarred and cracked ground. Dust, rocks, cactus, and other plants tumbled, knocked loose from their beds. As more dirt flowed off, billowing out, a rough shape emerged, then a body and five spindly legs.
Bile rose in the back of Lyssa’s throat. Sometimes the glass was half-full, and sometimes the glass was lying on the floor, shattered into a thousand pieces as the last water left in the house evaporated.
“This is just one of those days, isn’t it?” Lyssa squinted. “At least I know what the real plan was now.”
The gargantuan monster dwarfed the queen, and one of its legs alone was taller than her house. A dark, circular spine-covered body sat in the center of its legs. The spines twitched, shrank, and extended in no understandable pattern.
“Oh, wait.” Lyssa’s breath caught. “What am I worrying about? The sun will get it. You screwed up your timing, asshole.”
Each ponderous step of the twisted behemoth shook the ground. It wasn’t moving toward Lyssa. It was heading toward the
