Midnight's Son (Darkling Mage 5)

He was ten steps ahead of me. Or behind me, rather, clutching a knife and huddling behind a tree trunk. I guess I knew where I got my survival instincts from. He’d be safe there as long as we kept the shrikes under control.

I crouched close to the ground, my default setting in the face of danger. If you make yourself small and unthreatening, there’s less chance of something targeting you first. Conveniently, it also brought me closer to the shadows I cast in the grass, in case I needed to shadowstep myself into a more strategic position. Preferably far, far away.

But no. We were going to nip this in the bud. Burn away the shrikes, no matter how many of them came stampeding out of that portal. We were at our fullest strength, after all, both the friendlier bits of the Lorica and my own boys at the Boneyard gathered in one place. How convenient, I thought, as I backed away from the portal, as the first dozen shrikes whipped their tentacles at the air, loping and staggering for our throats.

I bent my knees, my hand hanging low as I formed my fingers around an invisible sphere, gathering heat into my palm, hissing through my teeth as the familiar vortex of white-hot air swirled against my skin. The shrikes tore out of the rift, sputtering and screaming. I gazed at the fireball growing in my hand, waiting for the right opportunity to strike.

Someone else struck first.

“Burn,” a voice bellowed from the back of our ranks.

A gout of fire, like something from the belly of a dragon, shot forth, roasting the entire front rank of the shrikes. I thought it was safe to assume that Romira had launched her offensive, but I knew she favored balls of flame, the way that I did. And the plume of fire kept going, like a flamethrower. I followed it to its source, and my jaw dropped.

Mama Rosa held a single burning coal in the palm of her hand, her lips puckered like she was blowing a kiss. From her mouth issued the massive stream of terrible flames. Rosa’s cheeks glowed red as she blew, her body straining, but it looked as if there was no limit to the capacity of her lungs.

Just beside her, Romira stood dumbstruck, her mouth half-open, before she remembered herself, launching a flaming orb the size of a beachball at the oncoming monstrosities. I lobbed in a couple fireballs of my own, quite unsure if my supporting fire was even necessary since I was so thoroughly outgunned by Rosa and Romira. Who the hell even knew Mama Rosa was a mage? I guess I never asked.

The rest of the party fell into battle with their respective skill sets, and as overwhelming as the flaming ladies were with their initial assault, we still needed every bit of firepower we could muster. The shrikes were pouring out in a steady stream, four or five abreast. I liked to think that we were ready for them, or at least that we were enough to fight back.

Carver hissed in strange, dead languages, long forgotten incantations driving the power behind the spells he used to transform the shrikes into clouds of worthless dust. Bastion slashed his hands through the air, each chop cleaving the shrikes at the torso with savage, invisible blades. Herald shredded the abominations with razor-sharp shards of ice, and Prudence and Gil were two halves of a whirlwind made up of talons and fists, flattening anything that came close.

And I hung back, pelting the stragglers with fireballs, saving my blood to feed the Dark Room in case shit truly got real. That was my actual concern with this spontaneous rift business, after all. We only saw shrikes when agents of the Eldest were around to summon them in such large numbers, and their appearance always meant that some huge fight was about to go down.

No evidence of that happening. And no evidence of what had caused the rift to tear open, either. We could shut this thing down, but how many more were going to show up around the city, and what were we going to do if no one from the underground was around to stop it? I shuddered to think.

But one step at a time. I hurled another fireball, feeling the strain in my skin and my lungs. I had never used so much of the flame in a fight before. Practice and Carver’s close instruction had taught me to be more economical about spending my reserves of arcane energy, but I could feel my batteries running low. In video game terms, I was almost out of mana. The others were still hacking and blasting away at the shrikes, but they had their limits, too. I wasn’t looking forward to resorting to bleeding myself.

“Push them towards the portal,” Carver called out, his voice thick with resolve and authority. “Take the fight to the rift.”

And so we did, nudging towards the gateway inch by painful inch. With one final, decisive push, our concentrated efforts battered the shrikes long enough to give Carver the opening he needed. With preternatural speed, he wove between our ranks, his voice soaring above the song of the portal and the noise of battle as he shouted guttural, barking phrases, terrible, forbidden words in a language long extinct.

He slammed his open hand against the portal.

Something in the world broke just then. The rift froze, then shattered with the clinking of so much broken glass, white shards of what used to be the gateway tinkling to the ground, then evaporating immediately into nothing. As quickly as it had appeared, the gateway had vanished. Had been banished, rather, by Carver’s spell.

“There,” he said, adjusting his tie, sweeping a single lock of displaced hair away from his forehead. “Did you all catch the words to the incantation? That’s how you shut the rifts.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “What the hell was that? Where the hell did you learn to do, well, whatever it was you just did?”

He frowned at me. “It’s called research, Dustin. I’ve been looking into ways of fighting the Eldest, and I found an ancient incantation designed to seal their rifts. It is the most reliable, most efficient way to stop an incursion into our reality. A method I can easily pass on to the rest of you.”

I looked around me, and everyone else’s face was a mirror of my own: we were all staring at Carver with our mouths half-open. We’d barely caught the words he had spoken – if they could even be called words – much less the language they belonged to.

“I didn’t understand any of that,” Bastion muttered.

“Arabic?” Herald offered helpfully. “I thought I caught some Arabic.”

“Right.” Prudence pushed her face into her palm and shook her head. “I guess we’re doomed.”

Chapter 4

“And the bigger question is why,” Gil said. “Why the hell is this happening? Why now?”

“How many times must I repeat myself?” Carver’s eyes rolled into the back of his head as he groaned, and I was sure I could hear his eyeballs rattling in their sockets. “The Eldest. Are coming.”

“Is there any way to tell if more of them will appear?” Herald asked, his teeth worrying at his lower lip. “These rifts?”

Carver narrowed his eyes, staring grimly, and said nothing.