The Blood Storm (Unwithering Realm Book 4) Read online

  Her features were cold and queenly, her chin sharp, her lips as red as blood, and her cascade of hair spilled past her shoulders all the way to her hips in wanton curls and spirals, a crimson cloud. She wore a sheer silk dress shining and jet like a bright darkness. A narrow sash set with emeralds and smaragds and cut stones of beryl from behind her neck crossed down between her breasts, tightly cinched her waist, fell in a triangle down the curve of her lower belly, and left long graceful tails to dangle between her legs.

  Little figurines made of sticks and wicker were woven in her shining fire-colored hair. There were no reins to the chariot, since the wolves were rational creatures, but she held a long-handled whip that crackled with dark red sparks. In her other hand she cradled a small bundle wrapped in swaddling, like a mother with a babe in the crook of her elbow.

  I call her car a chariot, but it was more like those lightweight traps used in horseracing, just a spidery framework holding two bike wheels, except that she was standing.

  She looked up at us. I saw that she had four pupils, two in each eye.

  Nakasu swooned when she glared at us, and dropped the flail. Ossifrage fainted, and dropped Nakasu. Ossifrage started to slump over the edge himself, but an invisible blue hand coated in mist grabbed his camel-hair cloak and dragged him back.

  Then the redhead looked at me, and it was as if every vein in my head was carrying jet fuel that right then caught on fire, and every artery, including the ones woven through my gray matter, was carrying liquid nitrogen.

  The pain blinded me, but I did not faint. I gritted my teeth and told myself that if I could not die, I sure as heck could not be poisoned by a nasty glower.

  “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle!”

  It came out as a scream, but with those words, I found I was wrestling back the flaming cloud of fever eating though my skull, and slowing the rate of burning — slowing it, but I could not halt it, much less drive it away. I had only moments of consciousness. I could still move my arms and legs, but it was like wading through boiling mud.

  “…And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host…”

  Sightlessly, I put my arms around the case holding my sword.

  “…by the power of God…”

  The case rattled under my grip. The thing was two or three hundred pounds. There was no time for Abby to burn through the lock, and I was not strong enough to pry it open with just my fingers.

  “…cast into Hell Satan, all the evil spirits …”

  But I was strong enough to put both feet against the back wall, and push.

  “… who prowl about the world…”

  The glass-and-iron case groaned, and at the spot where the bottom of the case rested on the shelf something snapped with a metallic noise, and the case tilted slowly, so slowly—

  “…seeking the ruin of souls!”

  —and the huge case and I both fell from the high warehouse shelf and we plunged down like a meteorite and hit the redhead’s chariot and killed her.

  I was unconscious when I hit, thanks to the power from her quadruple-pupil gaze boiling my brains, but the wolves did not have time to tear me to bits before I was painfully awake and back up on my foot. Singular. My other foot, and the bloody bits in the teeth of the wolf-things who were mugging me, I simply pulled back into myself with a huge and disgusting slurping noise, and I reached into the wreckage of the case — which had conveniently broken in two — and drew out my grandfather’s sword — which conveniently had not.

  “I take it all back,” I said in English. “Gross or not, my power rocks!”

  I flourished the blade overhead, so the cynocephali might know who they dealt with.

  They laughed. The manlike wolf-things actually opened their jaws and laughed at me and my sword.

  One of them spoke in Latin. I was not fluent, but what words I did not know, I could guess. “By strange alchemies the blood of beasts is mingled with ours, therefore no weapon forged in earthly fires, nor held in mortal hand, can wound the cynocephali!”

  I split his head in two with a downward, two-handed centerline stroke called men. I kept my shoulders loose and tightened my hands inward at the moment of impact, powering through the skull and jaw and in one stroke, chopped the golden ring in the floor. Wood splintered and there was a flash like lightning as the Moebius coil hissed and whined and crackled into silence. The ball of darkness evaporated, the twilight began to lift. (It looked darn cool, but I winced, certain I had chipped the blade.)

  I addressed them in halting Latin. “Good fortune, catuli!” Catulus means puppy. “My blade is not earthly, and I am not mortal, and your way of retreat is not …” I could not think of the word for unobstructed or uncontested, but I think the pack staring at their dead leader understood my meaning when I shouted “Tsuki!” and put my sword point with a two-handed lunge neatly into the chest of the next nearest wolf. The rich red blood of his heart sprayed out in a crimson parabola when I recovered from the lunge and brought the blade back to position: blade edge up, fists at eye level, feet wide, weight on the back foot.

  The blood on the blade caught flame, but the flames were an unearthly white hue instead of red or yellow, white as chalk dust, and there was no smoke.

  Sweet.

  Where that eerie white flame burned, it was as if bright sunlight, the sunlight of a summer noon, was in the chamber. The two wolves dead at my feet had sparks of the same white light fall into their blood, and their corpses began to blaze as they twitched and shuddered in their death throes.

  I centered my breathing, raised my blade aloft and back at an angle, wrists above the eyes, my weight still back and stance solid.

  There was fire over my head, and fire to my left and right.

  “Ecce homo,” I said, because it was the only Latin phrase I could think of at the moment. “Behold! I am the Man!”

  The wolves howled in madness, and roared in wrath, and attacked.

  Fate of the Fated Rarities

  1. Teamwork

  I was in the stance called Dai Jodan no Kamae: sword pointed up and back, hands overhead, weight on the rear foot, elbows rotated out, eyes front and looking out from under your wrists. It is an aggressive stance, designed to intimidate.

  The wolves did not seem intimidated, so I brought my hand forward and segued into the Gaden no Kamae: it is a low guard stance with the sword held below waist-level and the point held at about knee-level, which was the height at which the wolves’ gleaming eyes seemed thickest. This posture allows a quicker turn and strike toward any point of the compass. But I could not strike toward all points at once.

  It was bad. I should have put my back to the wall.

  The werewolves outnumbered me, and came at me from behind no matter which way I turned. It was a flood of teeth and nails. My bones broke under the teeth of the ones I did not kill. One big shaggy gray brute elbowed a surprised snow-white onto my swordpoint, fouling the blade, which was caught in between snow-white’s ribs. Before I could slide Dancing Maiden free of the white one, Big Shaggy tore my sword arm off at the elbow. With a flick of his neck, Big Shaggy tossed my arm (sword still in hand) to a coal-black wolf with a supercilious expression, who jumped into the air like he was catching a Frisbee. Coal-black grinned a bloodstained grin at me over his shoulder, ran straight up the far wall toward the window, and tossed my sword and my sword arm out the window.

  “Facilis descensus Averno,” he smirked. The descent is easy.

  I hate smart-alecky wolves.

  The whole thing was neatly done. Wolves are pack animals after all, you know? Team players.

  And the team jumped at my throat.

  Fighting unarmed and one-handed against monsters covered in invulnerable hair is no fun. I am sure it sounds like fun. It’s not.

  But there was one fun part: Big Shaggy, pressing his luck, rushed at me trying to rip out my crotch, so I just stuffed my hand down his throat and grabbed his tongue and used his own weight and inertia to flip him over my h
ip in a neat hip-throw.

  He sailed high like one of those girls in a poodle skirt you see dancing to big band music doing a flip over her partner’s head, except, in this case, the partner held onto the tongue and the momentum of the throw ripped it out of his throat. I tossed the severed tongue and clinging mass of blood and muscle at his face, saying, “No fur in your mouth, puppy!”

  That was about the only good move I had that round.

  “Saint Ailbe and Saint Edmund the Martyr, come now to my aid!” I prayed, because a young yellowish wolf had torn off my left hand just then. I looked like the Black Knight from a Monty Python movie.

  Coal-black over by the window chuckled softly, “Fide, non armis?” Faith, not arms.

  I managed to twist and drive the sharp end of my protruding femur into the young yellowish wolf’s eyeball with a dramatic squirt of eye jelly, and into the brain beyond.

  “No fur in your eyes, puppy!” I shouted. I admit the coal-black had better bantering skills than me. I guess he was homeschooled too.

  My severed hand fell onto the floor right next to the long-handled whip the witch had dropped. Something odd happened then: I got a moment of sensation from the hand, even though it was not connected to me. I closed my hand on the whip handle. Somehow, I could feel the texture of the whip handle in my hand, my severed hand. Then I was rolling with two wolves snapping in my face. By pure good luck, I rolled right over the spot where my hand was, and came to my feet, put my hand back on its stump, and put my back to a corner where the wall joined a museum shelf, and lashed out with the whip.

  Why? Because the whip could hurt them, or otherwise the witch would not have bothered carrying it.

  Dark red sparks danced with a hiss along the lash tip when I struck, and the sparks clung to the wolf-fur, blazing. Three and four wolves flinched back, spinning and circling, clawing and snapping at where the sparks tormented them: and suddenly one of the wolves I had not hit jumped into the air and fell down dead. Then another one. This second one, puking red, snapped with his jaws at his chest, and when his red teeth cracked on an arrow made of glass, I could see the arrow shaft outlined by blood and vomit. I could also see the shadow of the arrow outlined clearly on the floor, which was now nearly opaque with bloodstains.

  But there was something in my brain making me want to not see the arrow. The effect was spreading, so the dead wolves were fading from view as well. The arrows carried, or were made of, or were dipped in, that mist of invisibility Foster could summon up. Why this allowed them to penetrate invulnerable cynocephali fur, I don’t know.

  I cheered. But I should not have. The pack’s eyes darted to their two stricken brethren, now more than half vanished. Maybe if I had not cheered, they would not have noticed the blindspot in their field of view that was already swallowing up the fallen bodies. Foster’s arrows were cunning and nasty, if used for assassination: the corpse vanishes after you kill it. Unless your friend cheers before the mist spreads far enough, I guess.

  The cynocephali were smart: they understood what was happening. They could not see where Foster stood, shooting them with his longbow forged on the moon, but they saw Abby and Nakasu high up on the warehouse shelves, and Ossifrage in midair, and a slender red wolf barked out a command in Latin, and half the pack executed a turn and ran up the walls toward my friends.

  The other half ran at me. I lashed out with the whip, but some of them jumped at my face, so I did not notice the others flowing up the vertical walls to my left and right. The pack dropped onto my head, and the sheer weight brought me down.

  So then I was on the ground having my guts torn out, and I was thinking I should take Novocaine before combat from now on.

  But remember, I had shattered the Moebius coil, so the twilight had been diminishing through this vast room. It must have been clear enough just them, because Ossifrage (who was standing in the window) just wafted me up into the air.

  My sword and sword arm came floating through the open window and across the air toward me. My shoulder stump and my arm came together in a nice docking maneuver in midair, and that was partly my doing, and partly the levitation of Ossifrage.

  A wolf with more acrobatic skills than his pack-mates raced up the wall near the window, and leaped toward Ossifrage, even though the distance was too far to jump. But in midleap the animal barked and shot a tooth out of its throat — now, I am not sure if they were really teeth or what they were, but I am going to keep calling them teeth — and hit Ossifrage. I saw blood on Ossifrage’s head and neck, and he fell out the window. I tried to remember how far it was down to the balcony below, or if this was one of the places where the drop into the upper atmosphere was sheer.

  I fell too, but this time I managed to land, to roll to my feet, and to kill three wolves, one after another, running like a hare and zigzagging, and to hell with footwork. I only needed to make a shallow wound with this sword, and I could catch the wolf blood on fire. I made a mental note not to fall into bad habits in case the next enemy was not under the special curse of the Dancing Lady.

  Then I slipped on the burning blood. Blood was all over everything by that time, and burning with white fire. There was a pond, a lake of it, splashed all over the floor and halfway up the walls. Battles are messy.

  I slipped, and they were all over me. With admirable teamwork, they had me pinned down, and methodically ripped me limb from limb.

  I am not mentioning the pain, because I don’t know how to describe it. A mortal man suffers a finite amount of pain, because anything above a certain threshold will kill him. I did not have a threshold. I was in more than mortal pain, more pain than the deadly level. I was in immortal pain.

  And, looking up, I saw Nakasu. From somewhere, he had gotten a pole of cunning metal, and it expanded to tremendous length, and he was standing atop one of the warehouse shelves, and prying the shelf away from the wall.

  The shelf teetered. It was, by the way, the one all the wolves were climbing. It fell like a domino, banging into its neighbor.

  All the wolves mauling me were gathered into a huge tackle mound, and when the shadow of the falling mass came over them, with cages of bronze and chests of iron and giant cases of brass and glass sliding in a waterfall toward them, some of them were quickwitted enough to try to flee.

  They did not make it. Their fate was the same as those too petrified with fear to flee.

  There was a noise like someone dropping the moon onto the earth. About a zillion tons of museum pieces, shelves, stone, iron, crystal, wood, came down like an avalanche.

  I was trapped and flattened and buried alive, and the wolves were trapped and flattened and buried alive with me. The cases and shelving were made of bars and mesh, so we could still see out, and some of us were trying to wiggle and writhe. But there were only little gaps, like looking through a cheese grater, leading to the greater universe outside flatland.

  Too small to squeeze out of. But those little gaps were big enough to shoot into.

  And Foster started shooting the invulnerable werewolves with his invisible arrows one by one by one.

  2. Banter

  From where I was pinned, I did not see much of the remaining fight, but it also was not much of a fight. Any wolf that managed to escape the wreckage, if it ran up the wall to get away, Ossifrage, standing in midair, would whirl the creature into space, where it would be promptly shot by an invisible arrow from an invisible bowman. Foster’s power was not some lame Space Ghost-style invisibility, which leaves enemy noses and ears unaffected, but full-blown Shiwan Khan-style clouding of their minds, so they were forbidden from sensing him in any way.

  The wolves died, pierced by arrows of glass, and when he was finished, their corpses were all invisible.

  There was nothing sitting on the left half of my skull, and one eye was still working, so I could see the coal-black wolf in the window. He looked back at me, opened his jaws in a sad little grin and shrugged and said, “Ruinis inminentibus, musculi praemigrant.” When collapse is
imminent, the little rodents flee. And with that, he turned and ran away, and I heard his claws clicking straight down the outside wall.

  I shouted at his retreating back, “Come over here and fight like a man!”

  You know, I just think his banter was more literary than mine. I blame it on being an American. I cannot quote Pliny. I can quote all the good lines from John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, though.

  “Son of a bitch must pay!” I said softly after the retreating form. Which I guess was not actually an insult after all, considering.

  3. Three Reasons

  While I was trapped, I had a moment to think.

  I realized I felt bad about killing the witch for three reasons.

  First, she was an attractive redhead. Turning my head, I could see her shapely hips and legs sticking out from under a pile of bloody rubble. It seemed shocking that her body should look normal, like that of a person taking a nap, up to about waist level, and then be a horrible butcher-shop mess above the waist. It was a blasphemy.

  She wasn't gorgeous, and her eyes were certainly freaky, but she was good-looking and I smashed her head in with a museum case as big as a sarcophagus. It felt like breaking a work of art. It turns out that it is lots easier to kill ugly people than pretty ones. Go ahead, call me shallow, but I doubt you would like movies where heroes kill scads of orcs if the orcs looked like supermodels.

  Second, the witch looked kind of imposing on her chariot being pulled by wolves. She looked like a supervillainess. I thought she should have had a chance to make an impressive speech or something, not just get her neck broke having my unconscious body, and a three-hundred-pound museum case, drop on her from thirty feet up.

  Third, because you are not supposed to hit girls. Anyone who says girls can take a punch as well as boys has never been hit by me.

  I broke Sam ‘Sumo’ Humber’s jaw during a match, and that was with gloves on. He had his jaw wired shut for months and was eating through a straw that whole time.