Host (8 page)

I belong to someone?
A gentle joy welled up in me, surging with the beat of my heart. I was no longer alone. I was so tired of being alone. So tired of fighting.

“Thorn?”

“Stop her!”

A hand grabbed my arm, ripped the spur from me, and threw it to the street. Another raised a battle-ax above the amulet. The steel blade smashed down, breaking the talisman, disrupting the conjure. A shaft of dark lightning shot into the sky. Audric fell away from the broken barb, grunting. Thunder echoed down the street. Pain wrenched through my scars and a single pulse of white light lit them, a terrible schema of old wounds and ancient pain. For an instant, my amulets shone bright as a Flame. In the retinal afterburn, the world was a negative reality, black snow and white sky.

“What was that thing?” Eli shouted through the muffling of the gas mask. Audric, lying on the snow, shook with a single epilepticlike tremor in the aftermath of the explosion.

I snatched up my blades and stood. The whir of wings sounded and I tried to dance over Rupert's body, but stumbled, falling to the side. A blow sent me sprawling. A stinger whipped by my ear. A second dragonet hovered over Rupert, barbed legs to either side, long snarled fur dragging the street. The flying beast slashed a long gash down my friend's back.

I leaped at the beast's head, changing my grip on the tanto, bringing the weapon forward along the plane of my body. I drew on the prime amulet in the hilt of the longsword, pulled on the prime ring and visa, drawing all the power at my disposal into me. Strength poured in.

Midstrike, the visa suggested a verse from Job and I shouted, my voice swelling through the tourmaline into a mighty roar as I cut. “His hand hath pierced the swift serpent!” In a death strike, I thrust up under its jaw with the last word, snapping its mouth shut, driving the blade up through the roof of its mouth. The final thud against the top of its skull was a satisfying finish, forcing back its head, but again the tanto missed its tiny brain.

In a ferocious flex of muscle, it rose into the air over me, wrenching my left arm up as I gripped the tanto hilt. It carried my body high and again I shouted the scripture. Below me, a second dragonet darted in. I caught a glimpse of gray metal, a shaped ring, demon-iron forged over human steel. The claw holding it slid the steel along my body, into the bite wound on my calf. I screamed as the frozen metal seared down to the bone.

With a supple twist, the beast then dipped the iron against Rupert's body, following the length of the bloody wound in his back. When it came away, Rupert's blood splattered over my shins, hot and human, mixed with mage-blood. Comprehension blossomed, wordless.

The dragonet I had pinned thrashed in a vicious whip. The tanto blade slipped free of it. I hung suspended a moment, the blade plasma-bright. And then I fell to the ice. I gasped as air slammed out of my body. Breathless, lungs empty, I lay on the street, arms outspread, watching the night sky reappear overhead as the cloud of blackness coalesced into a spiral, forming a black tornado of might over the town.
A true Darkness,
the visa proposed.
Leviathan
.

Fear tightened my body and set off sparks in my vision. I understood why it had suggested Job in warfare. This was the vision of true Darkness Job had seen and prophesied. “Let that day be darkness; Let not God from above seek for it, Neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it…. Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.”

Leviathan
.

This was the opponent we faced, an evil who had played two roles in the rebellion against the High Host: as one who joined the Watchers, became their leader, and taught humans the arts of war before language had been recorded, and also as the left hand of Lucifer, taking part in that one's rebellion against heaven. Since the time of the Last War, Leviathan had been coupled with the name Azazel. Azazel was the left hand of Satan.

This Dragon had been bound three times, twice in prehistory, and once by Mole Man's sacrifice. The Dragon of Darkness was greater than we had guessed. I wondered if Mole Man had known the beast's name.

The coil of air tightened, growing darker, shot through with motes of emptiness like holes in the universe, a Darkness so intense it trailed afterimages of lightless tails. The spiral of power centered on the demon-iron in the claw of the small dragonet. A link three inches across, smeared in Rupert's blood. In my blood. “Oh, merciful seraphs,” I breathed. The Dragon, partially unbound from Mole Man's chain, was manifesting.

The tornado of power slipped through the link like a finger gliding through a ring and carried it into the night air, swirling through it in a twisting, undulating snake of black cloud. Dragonets flew beside it, trumpeting in victory. The ground trembled as the earthquake shuddered through the ancient hills.

Audric and Eli were right. It was indeed much more than a two-fer. Layered intentions, incantations, and conjures, purposes that covered every possible contingency. The Dragon was using the death of the townsfolk, the mixed blood, its minions, and the link to break fully free. The Dark Wind whipped overhead, the spirit form of the Dragon.

Close by, the WT7 boomed. A dragonet split in two, spraying me with gore, its head tumbling into the night. The two-foot section between was vaporized. The big gun boomed again. Flames darted across my line of sight, zapping the dragonets. Where had they been, the Flames and the big weapon? Fighting what? I remembered to breathe, my ribs creaking with the motion. The cloud of Darkness hurt to inhale, bitter with the taste of failure.

Two more booms took out other dragonets and a chunk of a nearby building. A group of EIH soldiers hacked a beast into little pieces, too small to regenerate. Another creature was wounded when Gloria and her husband, legs wide and braced against the earth's shaking, walked it down the street, pumping rounds into its underbelly.

I saw a flash of the beast's face, and I could have sworn it was surprised. Bullets had never worked on Darkness. Until now. Humans had always been excellent at devising means of death, and they had finally discovered how to kill evil with Dead Sea salt ammo. Ironic that humans, who had been taught the arts of war by Azazel, were now able to destroy its followers.

Beneath me, the earth continued to roll and shift. Along the street, buildings buckled, walls giving way. Stones and chunks of brick fell. The cloud lifted, riding the night sky.

EIH warriors raced up and down the street in el-cars, weapons booming. Elders rose to their knees and resumed praying. Human soldiers stood, wobbly, and checked their weapons. The tornado continued to roar, pulling light and life through the link. I gripped my prime ring and mouthed the words to mage in dire, but the sound died unborn. It was too late. I was too late. I should have called long before now.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

Once more I crawled to my feet. Audric struggled upright on the unstable earth, his face hard as polished marble. He strode to Rupert's side, knelt, lifted him in a fireman's hold, and carried his partner to partial protection beneath the porch of Thorn's Gems. Its three-foot-thick walls still stood, though a crack ran along the mortar from a foundation stone to the roof.

Audric eased Rupert to the snow and sat beside him, holding the smaller man like a child. Windows and doors brightened. Snow on the street was a scorched white pelt running between the buildings. The Darkness was withdrawing. The remaining few dragonets flew away, north. The funnel cloud thrashed and tightened. In a flash, it dipped down and touched the succubus. The scaled body crumbled to dust, the particles sucked up by the roaring wind.

As if wrenched through a hole in the air, the tornado disappeared through the link. Black wind followed and vanished. Misty remnants dispersed. Silence was so loud my ears ached with the emptiness of it. Above me, the stars and moon shone white and pure onto the blood-splashed snow and ice. Wood smoke billowed in the wake of the Dark Wind. The dark tornado.

My parents had been killed by a tornado. A tornado was one of the Dragon's forms. Two vital facts. Crucially significant. That meant its plans had been in place for decades. But I was so tired it was hard to think it through logically, point by point. All I could think was that Lolo, who had raised me when my parents died, had perhaps been behind the whole thing.

A voice whispered up from the depths of my mind:
Or a dupe, led astray
?

Weariness ached through my shoulders and hips, pain throbbing up from lacerated, frostbitten feet. My soles had bled in the boots and stuck. I tore ruined flesh with each step. My fingers had gripped the hilts so long, they creaked when I opened my hands. Bodies lay in pools of blood. The cries of the injured resounded weakly in the vacuum of silence left by the wind. So many dead and wounded. And all for nothing. I couldn't help the single sob that welled up in me and echoed quietly down the street.

I wanted to believe that the retrieval of its succubus queen and the loss of so many dragonets was the reason the Dragon disappeared, but the Darkness said it wanted a child of mine through Mole Man's line. Even though trapped in a different reality, had it been aware I was married to Lucas, a Stanhope, a grandchild several times down the line from Mole Man, Benaiah Stanhope?

There was too much I didn't know, but I knew this—the reason for its departure. It had plenty of blood, mine and Rupert's, mage and Stanhope. Mixed. And Rose? Did it have her?

It was all starting to make a terrible kind of sense. After Forcas and the dragon killed my parents, it had waited for my blood, unable to sense me for ten years. Then, in a moment of jealous anger, I had accidentally damaged my prime amulet and it found me. It had learned I was here, within the reach of its minions, placed here by Lolo, as part of her Machiavellian plan to free Barak, her lover, trapped on the Trine. Lolo, my Lolo, had been part of the Dragon's plan. Knowingly or unknowingly. I shuddered.

I hadn't been smart enough to figure it out, not good enough, fast enough, or strong enough. And because of that, the Dragon had what it needed to break the chain and finish what it had started so long ago. The destruction of humanity, of the seraphs, of the heavens and the earth. If ignorance was bliss, I'd never be blissful again. Tears trickled down my cheeks, the salt stinging in cuts and burns. This was my fault.

T
his town will not allow the heresy of the Earth Invasion Heretics to be spoken. We will remain pure, true to the Most High and his High Host,” Elder Perkins shouted, his brown robe quivering along his body, both hands fisted.

“You don't speak for all the citizens of Mineral City,” the small Cherokee woman said. “I say the EIH have every right to be heard. I'm the widow of Joseph Barefoot, who gave his life to save this misbegotten town.”

“So you say,” Perkins said. “We've seen no proof of his death.”

“She saw him die.” She pointed a finger at me. “Ask the town mage.” It seemed the entire crowd sighed. So did I.

It was morning, after a night spent gathering the bodies of the fallen Darkness and burning them. A night putting out fires that still smoked. A night healing the wounded and finding makeshift homes for the dispossessed. A night spent in grief and what-might-have-beens. And guilt. And anger.

Cheran, his fancy suit in tatters, fought fires, devising incantations and making conjures to melt snow and to snuff flame. I needed to learn those, but I wasn't speaking to the flashy mage. He was working hard now, but he hadn't fought when Darkness attacked. Instead, he had hidden under a glamour, throwing knives from a distance, helping only when it was prudent. He had accused Audric of cowardice, and then had behaved like a coward himself. He hadn't acknowledged me once since the conflict. He avoided Audric like the plagues. His shame was a harsh burden.

It was an hour after dawn, and most of the townsfolk were gathered in the Central Baptist Church, the building used for town meetings, and the rare worship service when the crowd was too large for the newer kirk building or when the kirk was under repair. Everyone was exhausted, frightened, irritable, and looking for someone to blame. I had a feeling it would be me.

The meeting was being shown on SNN live, because the reporter/cameraman—woman, rather—had found a way to rig up something through one of the few satellite phones in town. The broadcast wouldn't be delayed until the satellite dish could be repaired, though devil-spawn had done a number on it. Mineral City and its third fight with Major Darkness this winter was breaking news. Lucky me.

“Thorn St. Croix, you are called to the dais,” Elder Waldroup intoned.

Maybe Romona Benson would film me only from the rear. Or not at all, and just focus on the crowd. Maybe pigs could dance and horses could play the tuba. Maybe I'd grow wings and fly out of here. I heaved another breath, stood, and walked to the front of the old church.

At least I had found time to shower and change clothes. I wasn't speaking before the town splattered in blood, wearing pink jammies with hearts on them. I was in my clean black battle dobok and was fully armed. Had I been wearing the fighting uniform the night before, I wouldn't have been so badly injured, as the cloth was treated by mage masters to be impervious to the acid and ichor of the Dark, resistant to fire, and hardened to the cutting of claw and fang. Instead, I'd fought barefoot. In the snow. How dumb was that?

My feet ached and, like most of the audience, I had multiple bandages. I hadn't had enough amulets to heal my insignificant wounds when so many had been desperately injured. There were twenty-nine bodies; four townspeople were missing and presumed eaten; twelve others were grievously wounded, resting under seraphic healing domes in the fellowship room downstairs. The domes were thought to be mine. They weren't; they were Ciana's, but the town didn't know that and I wasn't telling.

Another twenty had minor wounds, and, when I ran out of both domes and healing amulets, I had forced Cheran to assist them. It had taken the threat of my sword through his testicles to make him comply, but he'd helped in the end. He didn't like humans and he wasn't a talented healer, but he was better than nothing.

Now, on no sleep, feet so sore it felt like I was walking on tacks, forearm and calf swathed in gauze, I was walking to the front of the room to address the town. Again.
Seraph stones.
The silent swear words made me smile. I actually owned a seraph stone.

The last time I had addressed the town, I had done so with all the flair of a mage storyteller. Now I made sure to dampen all my mage attributes as I climbed the seven steps to the dais, battle boots echoing in the silent church. My feet screamed with the torture and I felt a half-healed laceration break open. Great. More blood in my boots. Looking fully human, hurting, I turned slowly to face them.

Baldly, I said, “Joseph Barefoot and Tomas and Rickie Ernandez were EIH. Nazareth Durbarge was with the Administration of the ArchSeraph. Thaddeus Bartholomew is with Carolina law enforcement. Eli Walker is a miner with a claim in the mountains close by. They went with me to the hellhole on the Trine. Seven of us against the hordes beneath the mountain. We were outnumbered and outgunned.” Every eye was riveted on me. So was the camera. “We went underground and fought the Darkness.” The crowd gasped. No one, not even fools, went underground to meet the Dark.

“Inside the mountain, and later in front of the entrance, we fought a Darkness called Forcas. We won. But while we were fighting and dying, there was also a battle in the heavens. ‘As above, so below,'” I said, quoting the adage theologians used to explain the unexplainable parallels between heaven and earth. “In the heavens, the chains drenched in Mole Man's blood, the chains that bound the Dragon, were weakened.

“We were injured and lost half our number. We could have given up and come back down the mountain. We could have done nothing; but that would have meant that you”—I looked across the room; it was packed to standing room only, people sitting in the aisles and lining the walls—“all of you, would have died to feed his release. He was so close to getting free.”

Sudden tears filled my eyes and I batted them away, trying for composure, my throat tight, my hands gripping and regripping my swords for the comfort they brought. “Joseph and Durbarge went into the mouth of the hellhole carrying a weapon provided by, I don't know, maybe by the EIH. Maybe by the AAS. They died when they fired it.”

I could see the men in my memory, stepping into the opening, bright forms against the yellowish energies radiating from the cave entrance. Tears overflowed and the crowd, a shadowy and sullen cluster of humanity, wavered in my vision. “They weren't sure they could stop it getting free, but they knew they could slow it down, and they did. The Dragon's escape was interrupted. I had hoped it would last for a long time. It didn't.

“Last night, I think it used the deaths of so many of us to take another step closer to freedom. And I think if it had gotten totally free, it would have destroyed the town and used our deaths to feed its hunger.”

The crowd was silent. I took a composing breath and looked at Shamus and his brother sitting at the judgment table on the dais. They nodded for me to continue. For whatever reason, they had asked me to tell the town the whole bad news. A single bad dose, as if that would make it all go down easier. “You may as well know. The Darkness set off avalanches and cut communications. We're all trapped in this town, at its mercy, until spring thaw.”

The crowd erupted. Yeah. That was pretty much how I felt about it all too. I held up a hand to quiet them. “We can't get away. There isn't time to evacuate the town by nightfall. You have to decide what you're going to do about the Dragon getting free. Fight or die.” Having said my piece, I stepped to the edge of the dais.

“Why didn't you call for seraphs to save us last night?” a man's querulous voice called. “Some of us woulda died from its judgment, but the rest of us woulda lived, jist like last time.”

I spotted the man, his face creased with hate and his own version of judgment. I didn't care if he liked me or not, but the question was a fair one. “Calling mage in dire is dangerous. When I called mage in dire during the last attack, we got lucky. The seraph put away its sword. But sometimes, when a seraph draws its weapon, every human within ten miles dies.”

“Not the witchy-folk?” he asked, disbelieving. “You trying to say that mages don't die in judgment?” This was a dangerous question and it seemed calculated to feed the growing religious disharmony in the town. No way did I think he had come up with it on his own. He smoothed his black suit coat, darting a look once to the left. “Mages are better'n us?” I didn't follow his look but I would have bet the shop he was watching Elder Culpepper for approval.

Carefully, I said, “No. Not better. Some say that because we don't have souls we aren't worthy of the judgment of the Most High.” Some say. Not all. In fact, not most. But I kept that to myself.

He pursed his lips. “So. Like the dogs and cats, chickens and goats, like the other animals, you live.”

I couldn't keep the shock from my face and a low rumble of anger started in the old church. The camera was suddenly as big as a house, and I felt the focus tighten on me. “If you were trying to insult me, you succeeded,” I said, abruptly too tired to care about cameras or the motives and intent of my enemies. I'd had enough, and I slowly descended two steps from the dais, speaking as my boots scuffed the worn boards. “But yes, that is what a lot of humans think. That mages are no better than dogs.”

“Are the seraphs really members of the court of the creator of the universe?” another voice rang out. This one was clearly a member of the EIH.

I halted midway down. Before I spotted the speaker, another EIH voice called, “Are the things we call evil and good really only combatants in a war from another planet?”

“Blasphemy!” Elder Perkins bellowed.

“Tell us the truth! And not kirk lies,” the first EIH man said angrily.

“This is an outrage!” a woman shouted. “Arrest the EIH!”

Men in rags stood quickly. All were heavily armed, scattered throughout the meetinghouse. They were positioned so they could cover the crowd without getting caught in a crossfire. Not a good sign. The elders stood as well, and the black-clad orthodox. Voices were raised, and someone cursed. A struggle broke out in the back of the room. Mothers pushed younger children to the floor. It was escalating. Fast.

Romona Benson moved the camera from person to person in the crowd, filming.

“Thorn,” a soft voice said, “you have to stop this.” I met Elder Jasper's stare from three rows back. I noticed that Jasper had washed the blood off his face, then I saw that he was armed to the teeth.
Tears of Taharial.
A spurt of adrenaline raced through me.

My champards swiftly ringed around me at the foot of the dais. All three of them. It seemed I had gained a new protector. Eli was armed for bear. Or for fighting his kindred. He leveled a deadly looking matte-black gun at the crowd. Jasper was right. Only I could stop it. If it could be stopped.

I threw open my cloak to reveal the black dobok beneath, and the amulets of my office. I gripped the visa and drew on it. “Stop!” Amplified by the visa, the word rang in the tall-ceilinged room. Yelling real loud was about the only thing I had learned to do with it. That and ask it for advice in diplomatic situations. Avoiding civil war seemed to have been left out of its library, however, as it was oddly silent. Releasing some of my pent-up anger, I shouted, “Stop!” A window shattered; children covered their ears. But the crowd went still, fearful eyes on me.

“Sit down,” I snarled; then, softer, “All of you.” The visa throbbed in my hand, insistent, and I added, gently, “Please.” The near-mob slowly settled, all but the EIH, until Eli tilted his head a fraction. It could have been a coincidence that the operatives sat as one, but I doubted it.

I looked out over the crowd, the tears that had gathered gone, my eyes hot and painful in their aftermath. I had their attention. Now what? I drew on the visa for advice, my hand holding the four-inch-diameter pink tourmaline ring.
Family, community, history,
it suggested. Well, duh. I had that one figured out already.

“This town has fought in the war against Darkness for over a century. You have stood together, friends and neighbors, on the battlefield, when many others fled in fear.” I saw some heads nod. People were settling into their seats, their weapons disappeared from sight. I nudged Audric, and he sheathed his sword. The two humans followed his lead. But they didn't sit down. Good. They could be a shield in front of me and hide my shaking knees from the camera.

“One hundred years ago, when the Darkness seemed to be defeated, when the rest of the world began to divide into religious factions, when the rest of humanity turned on itself, this town met together instead. In this very building.” I let my voice mellow into a soft rhythm as I spoke. Mage storytelling cant. And if most of what I said was true, so much the better. As some Pre-Ap person had said, spin is everything.

“Your ancestors—Christian, both Protestant and the one Catholic family, Jewish, and the Cherokee—sat down together and worked out a system of kirk services that was fair to all. They built a new building that had no Pre-Ap religious symbols, and yet had room for all of them.” I looked across the crowd, assessing. “It wasn't easy. But they did it. And they didn't fight among themselves. You never have fought against each other, from the very beginning.”

That part wasn't the complete truth about the town history, but at least no one had died while the discussions took place, so it wasn't a total lie either. “In the kirk, you all meet, at different times and days, to worship in the forms you adhere to, all in one building, the kirk, the symbol of peace, just as the seraphs instituted in the rest of the world. What the seraphs had to impose on others, you figured out for yourselves.” More heads bobbed as the history of Mineral City and their ancestors took place of pride.

“You had only just settled the matter of kirk when the battle of the Trine took place. I don't have to tell you about that struggle. You teach it in grade school. Your children learn of the heroism of their ancestors and the sacrifice of Benaiah Stanhope, the Mole Man. You know your own history, your own bravery and self-reliance. That conflict, fighting alongside the seraphs, a battle fought without army troops, without air support, without high-tech weapons, but fought with faith and sacrifice, was the turning point of the war on the North American coast. Your ancestors were peaceful people who did what had to be done.