Dark Harvest (Darkling Mage 2)

“Stay down, Prue,” he yelled back. “You can’t fight like that. We’ll protect you.”

“Everyone needs to stop yelling,” I said, half-shouting, and half-regretting that I’d raised my voice.

Something slithered out of one of the pods, a snaking, black tongue. No, a tentacle.

“Dustin,” Vanitas said in my head. “This is bad.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

The black tongue split into six, then eight wriggling tendrils as it forcibly emerged from the pod in a burst of viscous fluid. The pod’s horrible ebony fruit fell to the ground with a sickening, wet thud.

Bastion groaned. “No, no, not this bullshit again.”

The black thing rose from its pile of gunk, then shook its torso to free itself of the slime. Where its head should have been was a mass of tentacles. It was a shrike, a minion of the Eldest, one of the throngs of gibbering abominations they called their children. The shrike raised its many limbs, and from tiny mouths lined with jagged yellow teeth, it screamed.

More of the pods and polyps burst along the stalk, like ripened cysts, and more of the creatures spilled and splattered to the ground, birthed from along the length of Thea’s demonic creation.

“Now that, you can burn,” Carver said, nodding at Romira.

“Cute,” she said, both hands outstretched, twin globes of fire building in her palms. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Time for that later,” Carver said. I bumped up against him as I retreated, only just catching him closing the last of his wound as he struggled to his feet. “For now: kill.”

Romira nodded. “Gladly.”

Over a dozen shrikes had already been birthed by the stalk, but each emptied pod soon became swollen again, filled with the horrible amniotic fluid that sustained each of these shrieking monstrosities.

Romira pelted them with expertly targeted fireballs, burning holes through their torsos to kill them, as if saving the best of her energies this time, no longer resorting to launching a gigantic ball of flame at their ranks the way she had done at the battle at Central Square.

Bastion had found another tree to play with, using it to swat the shrikes aside as a giant would sweep ants off a kitchen table. This was the second time we’d encountered these horrors, and if we survived the night, I was certain it wouldn’t be the last.

But this time we had the Black Hand – and I really needed to stop thinking of them as that – on our side. Carver was still reeling from his injury, the shoulder that once had a hole blown in it sagging, but he raised his one good hand, bared his teeth, then clenched his fist.

The front rank of the shrikes screamed, then disintegrated into dust. Clearly his policy of disabling instead of destroying did not apply to shrikes. Vanitas was already hard at work slashing and sundering, without even needing my command. I took it as a sign that our bond was growing stronger. And Gil – where the hell was he?

I shouldn’t have asked, and I shouldn’t have wondered. I’d thought to look for him on the fringes of battle, but he was stuck in the midst of it, and there was a very specific reason I hadn’t been able to pick him out. Gil had changed. Transformed would be the correct term. He had gone full dog. It was terrifying, and awful, and glorious to behold.

Imagine a man with the head of a wolf, standing with a canine’s digitigrade legs, all the vicious, destructive power of the animal’s claws driven with the sheer explosive force of the torso and arms of a man at peak athletic form. Do you have a complete picture in your mind? That still doesn’t compare to my first glimpse of Gil at his best, as a sweeping automaton of flaying death, painted artfully in fur, and teeth, and claws.

I knew well enough from Sterling’s stories that Gil didn’t really need a full moon to go full dog, as they liked to refer to the transformation. I also knew that this meant he was drawing on ungodly stores of his own energy, since this wasn’t the natural order of things – at least as natural as werewolves went. But it was gory, bloody, and absolutely majestic.

The thing that rended and tore at the shrikes had fur in the same black as Gil’s hair, his same eyes glowing red with hatred and bloodlust. When he ripped an abomination in two with his wolf-hands, and when he howled and bayed his fury at the moon, I swore I heard his same voice.

A hand clapped me shakily on the shoulder and I nearly jumped.

“Come on,” Bastion said, his eyes flitting between the shrikes and

the black wolf-man bounding between them in his dance of gleeful dismemberment. “It looks like your friends know what they’re doing here.”

“Where are we going?”

I didn’t have time to fight back as he hooked his hands under my armpits, hoisting me up off the ground. I kicked at the air, struggling to be let down, when I realized that I was being lifted much higher than Bastion could physically carry me.

I looked down, and then I understood. My body went limp, maybe as a survival reflex, because it felt like the best way to avoid slipping out of Bastion’s grasp and falling to my death.

We were flying.

Chapter 24