Axlam fidgeted like a fighter readying for a bout. “Soon,” she said.
A sigil sliced through the whiteout. St. Martin yelped.
“Where are they?” I ripped the remaining large bits of the amber off my face. “That magic is still embedded in open areas of my tattoos.” Not that I could do anything about it now. I just hoped it didn’t burrow into my scalp.
A rapidly-moving, body-shaped shadow flew toward us through the snow. Axlam responded before I did, and snatched the body around the neck just as I realized it was St. Martin.
Even with Dagrun throwing him at us, he still managed to fire another shot.
Axlam didn’t flinch or duck this time. She swung his body toward me. I caught his shoulder with my good arm, and flipped him over so he faced downward.
Axlam and I slammed him into the frozen ground.
His magic shell could only stop so much. His leg snapped, and likely a rib or two. He coughed. Maybe snickered.
The hit hurt him, but it didn’t hurt his magic.
The gloom and the snow blurred everything now, even Axlam, who was no more than four feet to my left. But I knew exactly what the glow coming off St. Martin’s carapace meant.
He was powering up just like he had in the Admin Complex parking lot.
I reached for Axlam. “He’s—”
I reached, and touched blood. He’d shot her.
She gasped and staggered toward me. And I knew why the bullet in my shoulder had fragmented the way it had. Why I could feel it embed itself in my bones.
He’d shot me with silver.
“Axlam!” I pulled her close and pressed my hand over the wound on her upper arm. The bullet had ripped through her blue jacket and grazed her upper arm. “It didn’t embed.” Maybe she’d be okay.
“… change…” Axlam growled. She snapped. I ducked out of the way, but I knew if I didn’t hold her with us, she’d bolt into the trees silver-infested under a Samhain moon, frantic about her son, and without an elf to help her hold onto her humanity.
I had to do something. “Concentrate on my voice!” I yelled. “Axlam!”
St. Martin pushed himself up. A wave moved through the magic of his carapace, then shifted upward into whining brightness obvious through the blizzard.
“Dagrun! We need to move!” I yelled. “He’s about to explode!”
She manifested out of the blizzard as a goddess of ice and snow. Frost swirled around her armor-clad body. The cold had solidified as a Norse helmet over her head and face. And her elven hair, her purely magical prehensile ponytail, crackled with the power of the blizzard.
Two hundred years in Alfheim and I had never seen the full glory of an elf in battle. I’d glimpsed it when Magnus pulled me out of Vampland. I’d seen it at a distance through a drunken haze the night Rose killed herself. But this was different.
Dagrun, the Queen of the Alfheim elves, was, in this moment, the Warrior Queen of Midgard.
She moved as if dancing with the storm in order to harness the torque of its winds. The blades of magic extending from both her fists pulled in the ice swirling in the air. A new sigil formed over St. Martin’s body.
She slammed her foot into the back of St. Martin’s head.
But even with all her speed, and the power of her magic, she didn’t see the shape of the blizzard’s maw above us. Axlam, growling from the pain of the silver and the coming moon, stood rigidly at my side.
They were magicals. They probably felt the explosive bursting of St. Martin’s shell as it reached upward for the descending snout, but they didn’t see the teeth. They didn’t see the distant magic that was, somehow, manipulating the shadows between the ice and snow.
The magic stored in St. Martin’s shell exploded. And that maw, that muzzle, snapped down onto the column, us, and St. Martin.
And that muzzle pulled meat from the bone.
Chapter 24
I had to do something. Anything.
The blast ignited the remaining magic amber embedded around my Yggdrasil tattoo. White hot fire raged across my scalp and down my neck, and merged with the remaining pain from my still-bleeding gunshot wound.
I staggered backward, tripping over a branch or rock buried in the snow. I couldn’t break my fall. Not with my damaged arm. So I was about to drop, blasted off my feet by a carrion beetle’s exploding shell, and land in a way that might cause a snapped bone, or a concussion, or something worse.
Except I didn’t. I tripped. I lost my balance. But my back rammed against something glass-smooth and solid. Something invisible, yet tangible.
Something amber-colored.
The hole in my shoulder throbbed with a burning rawness. Random spikes of searing agony mirrored by the heat embedded in my skin. My vision wavered—or maybe the magic did. A pulse moved through the wall and for a microsecond—for less than a blink—I saw pews.
Another searing blast of heat ignited the small spaces inside my Yggdrasil tattoo and formed a pattern of pain along my scalp, behind my ear, and down my neck. I felt the world tree in negative relief—it soothed as the world around it burned.
I bellowed and punched the amber magic.
The wall pulsed once more—as did the magic in my tattoo—except this time, the elven magicks on my person fought back.
The World Tree would not be felled by a toad.
Around us, outside the dome of amber magic, the blizzard rumbled like a distant tornado. Ice whipped through the air and into my nostrils even as the magic held it at bay. The wind stripped heat from my skin even as the dome stopped its push.
But the World Tree cast its own protections. The pews returned as four rows of rough-hewn benches. Each looked to be its own tree, and just as much grown as it was shaped by tools. I stood off to the side with my back still against
