Last Rites (Darkling Mage 6)

“If it was fully functional, they would have evacuated us to try by now,” Herald hissed. “And even then, do you really think it’d stand a chance against this thing? The beam hardly tickled the White Mother’s rift, much less her corporeal form. This Overthroat bastard is the size of a fucking house.” He threw another salvo of icicles, shredding the last of the lingering shrikes, then nudged his glasses up his nose. “No. Three houses. Maybe four.”

“Then what about the Scions?” I flicked my wrist, disengaging the sword that the Dark Room had given me, watching as it dissipated into motes of shadow. “Why don’t they show up and do some of the dirty work for once?”

Herald’s forehead crinkled, his lips pressed tightly together, and he frowned, hardly looking at me. The anger swirled in my chest. We both knew why the Scions weren’t coming.

“Then we fight, I guess,” I said, speaking with steel in my voice despite the fact that my hands were still shaking. “We do our best to fuck this beast up and send it back to the hell it came from.”

I sent Vanitas hurtling towards the portal, directing his scabbard at the Overthroat’s head, then his blade at the Old One’s neck. It was thinner than the rest of the abomination’s body, surely its weak spot. I grumbled to myself. Like the Eldest would ever make it that easy.

The clang of metal on bone rang through the night as Vanitas made impact, then rebounded violently away from the Overthroat. Nothing. He hadn’t even dinged the monster.

“A worthy opponent,” Vanitas bellowed in my head.

“Be careful,” I thought to him. “This isn’t like the shrikes. Remember the White Mother? It’s one of them.”

“A name is a name,” Vanitas said, whirling through the night sky, retreating just far enough to give himself a running start. I watched as his sword pointed directly towards the Overthroat’s head, then looked on as Vanitas sped unerringly, like a bullet, like a screaming missile.

“Vanitas.” This time the word came out of my mouth. “No.”

His laughter filled my head, his blood-thirst completely taking over. And as it sometimes, so very rarely happened, Vanitas ignored me, even when I phrased his retreat as a command, an order.

A flash of bright red light emanated from Vanitas’s jewels. The sound of snapping bone whipped across the graveyard. Then, for a moment, stillness.

He’d done it. That arrogant bastard had done it. He’d skewered the Overthroat’s skull, piercing through its bony forehead. From around Latham’s Cross, I thought I heard cheering. But Shtuttasht’s eyes swiveled upward, focusing ever so briefly on the thing lodged in its skull. Then from every hole in its throat issued a rattling, creaking noise that sounded like laughter. It made my skin crawl.

“Vanitas?”

He didn’t answer. A glimmer in the corner of my eye showed me where his scabbard was: falling useless and limp to the ground.

“V?” I shouted, running for the scabbard. “Vanitas?”

“Dustin,” Herald called after me. “Don’t do it, the Overthroat is – ”

I leapt across graves and skidded across wet grass, my mind an endless tattoo of “Tabi-tabi po, tabi-tabi po,” like the phrase was the absolute maximum of what my mind could process. I didn’t want to lose him again. But there was Vanitas’s scabbard, away from the battle, laying in the grass motionless. His garnets were dim. I fell to my knees, clutching him in one hand, his star-metal scabbard cold against my skin.

“Dustin,” someone shouted. “Look out!”

Shtuttasht’s glowing eyes, each a swirling facsimile of an Eldest portal, focused on me as it swiveled its rotting neck. The holes in its throat whistled with its horrible laughter.

The Overthroat opened its mouth.

Chapter 29

My body was not ready. Fuck, but none of me was ready to see the glowing white orb between the Overthroat’s teeth, suspended in that strange, fleshless space that was its mouth. A high-pitched keening sounded from its jaws, and the orb grew larger and larger.

Fuck.

I ran for it, away from the gathered mages, away from the portal itself, scabbard still in hand. If the Overthroat was charging up to blast me, then the best I could do was avoid collateral damage. Nobody else needed to be hurt that night.

“Dustin.” The word came from inside my head. It was Royce’s voice. “Behind you. Look out.”

Like a fool I looked over my shoulder as I ran. A massive white beam of corrupt arcane energy was lancing straight out of the Overthroat’s mouth – exactly like those lasers the Eldest had used to destroy the carnival grounds, the stretch of road outside Valero. Shtuttasht had been responsible for every one. Those blasts were powerful enough to smash concrete, to pummel the earth. And all I had was a flimsy human body.

I dashed harder, the cold night air scarring my lungs as I zipped towards a thicket of trees, at the very least positive that I wasn’t directing the Overthroat’s ire at a mausoleum, some poor guy’s remains. The night was so much brighter with the brilliance of the Overthroat’s

beam speeding towards my back. Soon I felt its heat tickling at my nape.

“Graves! Get the fuck out of there!”