Endless Knight (Darkling Mage 9)

A woman rose from among the waves, her hair braided with seaweed, her skin glistening with jewels and scales. Her face was imperious, arrogant, and frightening in its inhuman beauty. Her shoulders dripped with seawater as her body and her arms slowly emerged from the waves.

Her tentacles followed shortly after.

Chapter 2

That sure as hell wasn’t a mermaid. I sprinted over the jetty, then across the shore, hardly caring that my flip-flops had flown right off my feet in my hurry, hot sand filling the spaces between my toes.

The boys called my name as I ran, but my legs wouldn’t stop pumping. Who knew what I was even trying to accomplish, but I had to do something, anything. Scylla of the Great Beasts was making a public and literally splashy appearance on Lucero Beach, and I had to find out why.

“Mortal,” she boomed across the waters, her voice reverberating as if it called from somewhere in the depths of an ancient ocean. “The speck of dust. The one called Dustin Graves.”

I ran harder. The boys, Herald most of all, screamed even harder. I was pretty sure he called me an idiot. But Scylla clearly came for me – I mean, she just namedropped me, after all – and the sooner that I could deal with her, the sooner she could sink back among the waves and disappear. And the sooner I could get on the phone with Royce to beg him to deal with the inevitable fallout.

But it was far, far too late for that. This was the beach in broad daylight, on a weekend, no less. People already had their phones out, pointing and marveling at the specter from out of the sea. Sure, maybe to a normal civilian onlooker, Scylla might have looked like a marvel of special effects, like an animatronic dinosaur or a functioning replica of a Hollywood shark.

This was California, after all. You could still convince most of them that this was just a movie shoot. But at some point, someone was going to notice how Scylla’s tentacles were just a little too realistic, how her gills worked a little too well for simple prosthetics. And worse, someone was going to swim right up to her out of curiosity, and probably get torn limb from limb for the effort.

I was wading through the waves by then, the seawater warm around my calves, my feet digging through clumps of wet sand, my shorts soaked. Scylla beckoned with one finger, her eyes rolling impatiently as I approached. If she had feet, she would have been tapping them.

“Goddamn entities,” I huffed, sweat already dripping down my back. “Everything has to be a goddamn spectacle, she can’t just bang on my bedroom door like the rest of them, has to be this whole production, can’t just – Scylla, hi.” I forced a smile onto my lips, because this was still an entity, after all, someone who could rip me apart if I so much as looked at her the wrong way. “Now’s not a good time. Can we postpone this, maybe? I have a really nice bathtub at home. We can talk there.”

One of Scylla’s tentacles whipped at the water, scything through it and sending new waves rippling and crashing against me. I fought to keep my balance, my hands thrashing through the water as I tried my best not to get knocked on my ass.

“It does not please me, human,” she said, sneering as she forced the word out of her mouth. “To be sent to you as a messenger, to be put on this errand for the sake of my council. I am here on Tiamat’s behalf. She has a message for you.”

“And?” I tilted my head at her, my eyebrows raised, my body fighting every impulse to say something sarcastic.

Scylla raised her hands, her tentacles mirroring the gesture, rising around her like spines, like the pillars supporting a temple. “It has begun.”

The water was warm. The day was hot. Yet the sensation creeping down my spine was very much of my sweat turning as cold as ice.

“What has begun?”

“The end of all things, perhaps,” Scylla said, bored again, trailing one finger in the waters, her tentacles receding. “This great adversary of yours, this witch who serves the Old Ones – she has split herself, body and spirit, into many disparate pieces.”

I stuck my hands on my hips. “You’re kind of late to the party on that bit. We’ve known about Agatha Black and her Coven of One for a while now.”

“Oh? And I expect you know about her movements as well, how she intends to bring her wholesale slaught

er across the various corners of your beloved earth?”

“What?”

Scylla looked past my head, her eyes searching the sky, or perhaps piercing the ethers for a glimpse of what Agatha was doing. I had to hope for Scylla’s sake that Agatha wouldn’t look back.

“Right this moment. Yes. It is curious, how she has chosen to orchestrate her killings. Each of her manifestations is, right now, planning what appears to be a series of ritualistic murders. A symphony of sacrifices.”

My mouth fell open, the breath caught in my throat. “We have to do something about this,” I said, turning back to the shoreline, trudging through the waters, sloshing my feet through wet sand.

Scylla scoffed. “And what would you do, little speck of dust? The sacrifices are coming. There is nothing to stop, unless you can find each of the thirteen manifestations. The witch will spill the blood that she needs.”

I stopped in place, steadying my breathing, suddenly aware of the banks and banks of innocent normals with their phones and cameras pointed in my direction. Their faces were twisted with looks of irritation: I was blocking their view of the wondrous sea-woman behind me.

If they only knew, I thought. If they only knew that my friends and I were all that truly stood between humanity and hell on earth, and carnage, and madness eternal. Someone yelled for me to get out of the way. I turned over my shoulder.

“Scylla. Why is Agatha doing all this? What is she hoping to accomplish?”

Her face said everything, but she was too proud to say that she didn’t know herself. Her lips parted as she tried to speak, but her eyes darted away from me, focusing on a different point in the water. She bared her fangs, hissing.