Midnight's Son (Darkling Mage 5)

And before I could even gather enough of my en

ergies to form a fireball, a sphere of flames exploded just by my feet. The heat itself was enough to scare me away, but it was the sheer explosive impact of the projectile that threw me off balance.

I looked up, scowling, already aware of the fireball’s source. Fucking Other Dustin. “Get down here so I can rip you apart,” I shouted.

The homunculus only smiled and said nothing. He raised both his hands, and at first I thought that he had gathered two large fireballs in them. How wrong I was. The light came from the dozens of little spheres he’d effortlessly created. They hovered in his palm, like fireflies – then zoomed towards the ground, scattering in different directions.

The forest turned bright orange from the sheer quantity of Other Dustin’s grenades. That asshole had a direct line to an insane amount of spiritual force, tapping right into Nyx’s supply. He wouldn’t be able to pull off these feats otherwise. If only I could take the Crown of Stars from him, wear it myself. Then I could take down the White Mother. At least then I would have a chance of –

“Fuck,” I shouted again, dodging another salvo of Other Dustin’s flaming bombs, three of them slamming into the ground in succession. I scrambled away from the fires they lit in the brush, gritting my teeth as I tested my connection to the Dark Room, like some fucked up magical version of resetting my wifi router and hoping for the best. No response. No signal.

But I still had my brain, didn’t I? Maybe I was taking the wrong approach. I dashed in a wide arc around the White Mother and her shrieking children, looking for the first telepath I could find – Royce, as it turned out.

“Distract the homunculus,” I said, pointing up at Other Dustin. “Tell the others.”

“No, you tell the others,” Royce said, lobbing his own fireball at one of the shrikes, turning it into a writhing mass of tentacles and flames. “If you haven’t noticed I’m kind of busy at the moment and – ”

“Royce,” I said, clutching him by the shoulder. “Please. You gotta trust me. You gotta trust in – ”

“Don’t fucking say it.” His eyes flicked up and down my body. “And I don’t know why I’m listening to you when you’re half-naked and covered in your own blood, because you look completely insane, but fine. Consider it done.”

He touched two fingers to his temple, like he was activating some unseen electronic device. From around the clearing heads turned in our direction, if only briefly. At least half of them nodded, understanding. That was good enough for me.

I broke away from Royce as he covered his entire fist in flames and punched the living daylights out of a shrike. I ran until I was close to Prudence, who was kicking shrikes into exploded giblets that burned blue from her arcane fire. Next to her was Gil, who used his talons to shred anything that came too close. Asher, I noticed, and Romira were doing what they could to pelt Other Dustin with magic missiles.

Okay. He was preoccupied, and I’d found good enough cover. I took off my shoe, sucked in a heaving chestful of air, then ran my dagger across the sole of my foot. I hissed at the pain as black blood bloomed on my skin, but hey, we were running out of options, and I had to get creative. So the Dark Room wouldn’t listen? I was bloody well going to make it.

I winced at the initial pain of moving around the glade not only barefoot, but with a gash cut into my sole. I grimaced as I felt every blade of grass that made contact with my open wound, but after a quarter of the way the cold air and the sheer adrenaline pumping through my blood numbed the pain. Plus I still had to hurl fireballs of my own making to help with the tide of shrikes the White Mother was pushing out of her horrible womb.

Yelzebereth’s eyes snapped towards me, even through the thick of battle. I couldn’t have been imagining things. She could hear my thoughts. How else was she picking up so quickly on everything? Again she said nothing, only grinning at me. Then the White Mother threw her head back, and screamed.

The sound was horrific, as terrible and as alien as the shrill keening of the rift that she had used to enter our world. It mixed the discordance of flutes with the screeching of metal – and what sounded convincingly to me like the voice of a woman screaming as she was being flayed alive.

From above her, Other Dustin descended gently, the shadows at his feet lowering like a moving pedestal. He shrugged off the magical projectiles the others flung at him, ignoring them as if they were as harmless as flea bites.

“You call, and I come, White Mother,” the homunculus cooed, commanding the shadows to recede until his feet were planted firmly on the ground. Then he went to his knees, embracing his mother by the thigh, planting a kiss on one of her cruelly taloned hands. “You call, so I am here.”

And all the while Yelzebereth screamed, like a siren to signal the end of days, like a trumpet meant to herald the apocalypse. And from the ground at her feet, from all around her, erupted tentacles as black as night, flailing and whipping indiscriminately, bashing her own shrike children, swatting them into the forest, and striking Gil and Sterling hard enough to send them both flying.

I looked on in mounting terror as a creeping familiarity came over me. The White Mother was conjuring shapes and swords from out of the darkness, using them as weapons to smash and to slash at her enemies. It looked very much – too much like how Other Dustin had taken full control of the shadows of the Dark Room to create his own meadow of cutting black grass.

It looked too much like the power that dwelled in my very heart.

Chapter 33

Cold sweat ran down my neck. So this was it, then. All this time I’d been using the Dark Room I had never once paused to consider that I was tapping into the same unholy energies that powered the Eldest. At least on a visual level, it was clear to me that the White Mother was using the same horrible shadow magic that I had access to.

It was clear to everyone else, too. Prudence had retreated far enough to safety, but her face, illuminated in the azure fire burning at her knuckles, was rapt in shock. She looked between me and the White Mother, recognizing the field of spears, the storm of swords. I caught Carver staring as well, his expression, perhaps mercifully, unreadable in the moment.

But this wasn’t the time for doubt. Shouts of renewed vigor rang across the battlefield as Romira and Royce sent balls of flame sailing towards Other Dustin’s vulnerable body, as Herald shot huge, lethal icicles to pierce him from stem to stern. Across the way I caught the glow of pale green energy as Asher executed a spell of his own.

Wicked spires of sharp bone rose from the earth by the White Mother’s feet, but she smashed them with a single slash of her talons. Yelzebereth only shrieked harder, flicking her hands in a strange, jerking gesture. As her fingers turned up, so did the shadows, the tentacles of darkness forming a cocoon around Other Dustin, a sheath made of blackest midnight.

The spells meant to destroy and assail Other Dustin crashed against the ebony shield, dissipating into wisps of elemental nothingness. The White Mother recognized one of her own brood, and she was protecting him. And even she knew that the homunculus wasn’t as expendable as the shrikes. Surely she knew what it meant for him to wear the Crown of Stars.

And what would the Eldest do with such power?

Fuck that. No more hesitation. I kept on running, my bleeding foot aching with the contact, hurting ever more as the White Mother continued her horrific, wordless song. In my mind I summoned Vanitas to return to me, and without hesitation he sped through the darkness, whistling and screaming through the air towards my body. Then I took the final step, that last bloody footprint the one thing I needed to complete the sigil. I looked across the clearing, seeing none of the redness of my blood against the wet, black grass, but I knew it was there, seeping into the ground.