Last Rites (Darkling Mage 6)

This wasn’t Valero, not the Valero I knew. Those flattened trees, the broken lampposts with transformers and power lines still hissing with live electricity, the shattered gray and painted white asphalt of a road that had been blown to fragments. A crumpled sign by the side of the road welcomed and wished you a great stay in Valero.

We were just outside the city, just near the limits. And I would have heaved a sigh of relief if it wasn’t for the cars that had been struck by the impact of the Eldest’s attack.

Twisted heaps of metal, some burning, others smashed flat into the ground. Dozens of them, motorists going in and out of the city who had no idea that this particular drive was meant to be their last. Among the smoldering heaps of rubber and the broken bits of street spread pools of crimson blood.

My heart was so far up my throat that I could hardly breathe. We’d always been around to save the day before. Whether it was the boys of the Boneyard, or Team Lorica, in whatever configuration, we were there to stop people from dying. But not that day.

There were no survivors. Asher told me so.

“This can’t be happening,” I stammered. “Carver? We weren’t even near this place. I thought I was the lodestar. The Eldest can only destroy what they can see, and I’m all that they can find.”

Carver gnawed on the backs of his knuckles, his enchanted eye glowing as it scanned the devastation, his real one hardened, burning with fury. He answered in a measured, steady voice.

“Things have changed, Dustin. For the worse.”

I walked among the wreckage, checking in the cars, my stomach churning as I saw broken, battered pieces of what used to be people. No one was moving. I couldn’t hear voices of normals asking for help, of anyone crying. Some twisted part of me kept hoping that I would hear someone, something. But nothing.

Except for the strange, thick gurgling that came from within the earth.

I whipped around towards the noise of it, startled to find what looked like a shiny, black bubble inflating, gaining in size, welling up from the cracks between the asphalt. Wait. That looked familiar. The bubble kept growing, something inside of it pulsing, writhing, slithering.

Oh no.

“Shrikes,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. “How?”

“They’re salting the earth,” Carver said. “The Old Ones mean to truly overwhelm us this time, not just with destruction. More of these things will rise, to bring more of these accursed creatures into our world.”

Asher scowled. “Like a factory seeded in our reality? They’ll just keep coming?”

“But this didn’t happen at the fairgrounds,” I said. “I was there last night.”

Carver rounded on me, his teeth bared. “You were what? And where?”

I gaped for a moment. “I – I was exploring the Dark Room, and the Bazaar of – it’s a convocation of oracle entities. They pulled me into the carnival again. Madam Babbage? That’s Baba Yaga.”

Asher gaped even harder. “She’s what? Holy crap.”

“You might have considered sharing this little snippet with me, Dustin,” Carver snarled. “We’ll discuss this later. For now, we have a massive problem to deal with.”

“Agreed,” I said, nodding shakily. More and more of the polyps rose from the earth, glistening black sacs that looked exactly like those Thea had created on the beanstalk from hell she summoned at the Nicola Arboretum. There were dozens – no, scores of them popping up all over the place, like mushrooms.

Then the first one split at the seams, tentacles slipping out of its membrane, probing at the air. The shrikes were coming.

I readied my connection to the Dark Room, in case I needed its spikes and swords to do my work for me. Asher slashed his hand through the air, great pillars of sharpened bone erupting from the ground, skewering the first of the shrikes. Carver muttered in foreign, yet by now familiar words behind us, an incantation I’d heard enough times to recognize as his disintegration spell.

I used the time to form a sphere of fire in the palm of my hand, clutching it close to my chest, infusing it with more heat, more flame, more of my anger. Enough of the polyps had burst to birth at least two dozen shrikes, their horrific shrieks filling the air as they staggered and dashed towards us. I twisted at the hip, ready to pitch the fireball at the oncoming rank of abominations –

When a flash of something that shimmered like glass cleaved through the air – and through the entire row of shrikes closest to us. They screamed from the multitudes of mouths embedded in their bodies and tentacles, severed through the hip, at the torso in gushing spurts of horrible black blood, like a massive, invisible blade had been run through them in one go.

My pulse quickened. “Bastion?” I called out, not even sure where he was.

“Here,” he called back, dashing up to join us.

Sebastion Brandt nodded at me primly, then clenched his fist. Piles of debris rose into the air, held by his power. He fired them into a deadly salvo of improvised ammunition, a hail of gunfire. Broken asphalt and twisted metal tore through the shrikes, ripping them into blackened, bloody pi

eces.

I hurled a fireball, savoring the explosion as it blasted a half dozen shrikes, then nudged Bastion with my elbow. “Is the rest of the Lorica coming?”