Kingsbane

Eliana’s head buzzed. She felt sheltered in the arms of this girl. Jessamyn kissed her throat, and the warmth of her lips banished Eliana’s dark thoughts, leaving her golden and soft.

“Then I’ll indulge you,” Eliana whispered. She hooked her arms around Jessamyn, slid her hands up Jessamyn’s shirt, and splayed her caged hands across her bare back.

With a breathy laugh, Jessamyn shuddered. “You’ve got the idea,” she said, and then she shifted atop Eliana, locking their hips together, and began slowly to move.

• • •

Gunfire awoke Eliana.

She sat straight up, holding her breath.

Beside her, Jessamyn jumped to her feet. She grabbed her gun, slapped on her weapons belt, shoved her knives into their sheaths.

“Come on,” she cried before bolting out the door.

Eliana fumbled for her own knives and stumbled outside into a dim morning. A new, cool wind tossed the pines above. Over the distant hills, a storm approached, and a steady rain stippled the ground.

The camp was chaos—refugees running for shelter, Gerren herding a few of the children into a ravine, Patrik shouting orders. The two old men who lived in the cottage had loaded up a battered wagon with the Caebris prisoners. Their shaggy horse stamped nervously, prancing in its yoke, and the wagon itself sagged beneath the weight of too many passengers. The old men snapped the reins, shouting at the horse to move.

Eliana ran toward Patrik’s voice. The coming storm muted all other sounds but those of battle. It was a dim world—churning slate-blue sky, swaying black pines, the rocky brown soil, gray piles of dead pine needles. Gunfire pierced the air like spat nails. Eliana ran low to the ground, her boots slapping the earth, and at last found Patrik at the low stone wall where he had stood on watch. He crouched behind it, weapon trained on whatever lay beyond. Harkan and Jessamyn flanked him.

Eliana raced over and slammed against the stone next to Harkan right as a bullet struck the wall, sending sprays of rock flying.

“What is it?” she cried. “Adatrox?”

“And something else,” Harkan replied grimly, the rain washing blood from his cheeks.

A chill raced down her spine. “Crawlers?”

Patrik glanced at her, his expression grave and significant. “And beasts.”

Eliana peeked over the wall, her nose stinging with the tang of gunpowder—and saw at once what Patrik meant.

Just out of reach of their weapons fire, prowling along the low stone wall at the far end of the paddock, were three dark shapes. Eliana’s first thought was mountain lions, for they moved sinuously and had thin tails nearly as long as their bodies.

But then one of them reared its head and let out a horrible, flat cry, like a slow drag of blade against blade.

Eliana’s blood ran cold. She’d never heard that sound before, but the look on Patrik’s face told her everything she needed to know.

“Cruciata,” she whispered.

Jessamyn cursed. “You’re sure?”

“What are they?” Harkan asked tensely.

“Vipers,” Patrik said. “Their hide is tough, but they’re vulnerable beneath their chins, and at the start of their hindquarters, where leg meets belly.”

But then came another piercing cry, and when Eliana looked over the wall once more, she saw the three beasts leap over the fence and rush toward them through the woods—just as three others dropped from the trees, wings spread wide. They were small and slender, scaled jewel-green and blood-red, with wide, hook-tipped wings. They sliced so quickly through the air that Eliana felt dizzy watching them.

“Raptors!” Patrik cried, gesturing at the sky. “Shoot them!”

Immediately Harkan and Jessamyn trained their guns on the raptors, but the beasts spun and spiraled, too fast to fix on. Bullets flew uselessly through the air.

Then one of the raptors dove.

“Get down!” Harkan cried.

The others ducked, flattening themselves against the ground, the wall.

Eliana sprang to her feet, grabbed Arabeth from her hip, and stood tall for as long as she dared. The raptor approached in one blink, two—and then, as it neared her, its talons outstretched, its yellow eyes wide and pitiless, she threw herself to the ground at the last moment and rolled away in the mud, barely evading the raptor’s grasp. It spun away and turned in the air with a furious shriek.

She pushed herself up and flung Arabeth at the creature’s exposed belly. The blade struck true, and though the raptor tried to fly away, it soon faltered, crashing to the ground.

Eliana ran for it, yanked Arabeth from its belly, and turned to face the others, triumphant.

Her stomach dropped to her toes.

Two more raptors swooped down from the trees to chase the fleeing refugees through the remains of camp. They dove and grabbed, flying back up into the trees with their screaming prey clutched in their claws, and then dropped them. Skulls cracked open against stone, terrified screams abruptly silenced.

Gerren ran out from the orphans’ ravine, rifle slung over his shoulder. He threw himself down behind a felled, half-rotted tree and fired at every cruciata he could find, but there were too many of them—at least a dozen, perhaps more—and they were too fast to kill, too alien, too other. One dropped after Gerren’s bullet struck its chest and crashed into the roof of Jessamyn’s shed.

But only one.

Another dove for the old men’s wagon, grabbed one of the freed prisoners, and returned to the air. It tossed the woman high, caught her in its grinning beaked mouth, shook her viciously until her screams ceased. Another alighted upon the poor frightened horse, sinking its talons into the creature’s hindquarters. The old men jumped off, helped the surviving prisoners out of the wagon. They scattered through the woods—some running for the city, others for the wilderness.

The sky was thick with swarming raptors—red and green, deadly jewels against a canvas of gray rain. They weren’t alone. Adatrox followed, and others did too—humans loping like apes, like wolves with mismatched legs. Crawlers. Women transformed into monsters.

Gerren desperately reloaded his rifle.

Shots fired from across the paddock every few seconds, keeping Patrik, Jessamyn, and Harkan, and the others pinned behind the wall, in a gathering puddle of mud and blood. The adatrox were using the cruciata as a first offensive wave and the crawlers as a second, making their own kills that much easier. But how could they do such a thing—control women more monster than human and thoughtless violent beasts from another world?

Eliana watched death come inexorably for them through the trees. Sounds fell away; she focused on the in and out of her breath.

An angel had to have been working through the adatrox, using their vacuous minds as a way station to puppeteer both the monsters they had made and the monsters they had awoken in the Deep.