Feeding Frenzy (The Summoner Sisters Book 1) (20 page)

“Summer!  Focus!  I need you back, please, quick!” she’s saying hurriedly, in low tones.

“Yeah…yeah, I’m here.  What’s up?”

“Look.”

I groggily look around us and see doors all over the immense courtyard opening up, admitting
daimones
from every direction.

“Oh, give me a break,” I whisper heatedly.  “Slap the detective.  We gotta bounce.”

Lia helps me stand up and urgently begins talking to him while I survey the best path out of here.

“Hurry!” I whisper.  The nearest
daimon
is less than ten yards away.

“Lia!  We’ll have to leave him,” I whisper to her as he snaps back to us, and begins weeping into his hands.

“No, I won’t!”  More
daimones
approach, closing the net around us.

I frantically plot out our rapidly diminishing escape routes.  My senses scream and run through scenarios that become more and more impossible with each step that the Erinyes take.

“Detective!  Get it together!” Lia yells, shaking him furiously.  But it’s too late now.

We’re surrounded.

“Detective!  Come on!  Do you
want
to die?”  Lia shakes him with her one hand.

“All my fault…all my fault,” he moans.

“Well, let’s go make it better.  Don’t you want to make it better?” Lia asks in desperation.  The
daimones
begin to fill every opening in the arched circle containing the tree.  We should have let Somnia take us; that would have been a better way to go.

“Yeah…let’s…make it better,” he says, drying his eyes.

Lia throws her distraction hex full in the chest of the nearest
daimon
.

The monster begins stumbling tipsily, and turns from us to push its sibling.  In the confusion that this inspires, Lia and I grab the detective in our bound hands and steer him through the small opening caused by the fighting.

“Run, run, run!” I yell as Lia and I launch into an awkward full sprint.  Our stealth charms work miraculously as we squirm through the outstretched hands of the hungry Erinyes who can’t quite seem to pinpoint our location in time to reach us.  We find our stride together and make it across the rest of the courtyard to the door we’re seeking, dodging the
daimones
as we go.  Lia essentially kicks the detective through the door and dives in after him.  I’m right on her heels, when suddenly my foot is yanked from under me, and I go down.  My chest smashes into the stone of the courtyard, my injured arm wrenched by the blasted handcuff.

One of the Erinyes has me by the freakin’ leg.  I should feel something about that, but I’m just so
tired
.  I realize that this must be Hypnos, the sleep
daimon
.  Well, sleep and I have had plenty of fights in the past, I don’t know why now would be any different.

I prepare a vicious kick to its face.  With my legs feeling like tree trunks however, it’s more like I try to scrape it off my foot with my other foot.  It’s not quite as effective as I’d hoped, though it does get the
daimon
to hiss at me.  At least I pissed it off.  It really would be kind of nice to just take a small nap…twenty minutes would do me good right about now, I muse.  I kick it again feebly—managing, I think, to itch its kneecap successfully.  I’ll just close my eyes and rally again.  Through my heavy eyelids I see Lia leaping over me in a flying side kick aimed right at the
daimon’s
chest.  Her hit lands solidly, knocking the Erinye several feet back.  From the second her foot makes contact, however, the energy leaves her body and she goes limp.

“Sorry!” she apologizes to me as the handcuff stops her jump short, yanking my arm again torturously.  She tries to catch herself with muscles that are slow to react to her commands.  She just manages to balance on one foot, and only steps on me briefly with the other.  The new wave of pain shakes the drowsiness from my system and I half crawl, half get dragged through the door.  We slam it shut behind us.  I fall to the ground while Lia locks the heavy, wooden barricade and settles down beside me.

“So far, so good,” I joke feebly.

“Ha, yes.  This is going swimmingly.  You holding up, Kline?”  Lia turns to the dazed man.

“I…I don’t understand.  I was with my wife and son, and he was alive and playing and…where are they now?  Is he still here somewhere?”

It seems like the Tree of Somnia knew just where to hit our dear pain in the ass for the most impact.

“No,” Lia says kindly.  “You saw a dream.  It is
not
reality.  Try to put it behind you.”

He nods vacantly, his vision clearly still haunting him.

“We’re…really not on Earth, are we?” he asks slowly as Lia helps me stand back up.

“Nope.  ‘Bout as far from earth as we can get, until we start dealing with a pantheon that believes in extraterrestrial gods,” I say absently, investigating our surroundings through my mounting headache.

I look at him, and I can tell he’s really crushed.  I sigh.  This is bad enough for Ophelia and me, and we’re what you could call familiar with the danger and psychic toll of our lifestyle.  It would be truly traumatizing to be going through this nightmare without any preparation.

“What you’re feeling is normal,” I tell him softly.  “No one wants to believe in this stuff—which is why no one does.  You should take a breath…the Erinyes are legion.  We’ve been lucky so far that we’ve only met up with age, illusion and sleep.  So I need you to build a wall, detective.  We’re about to go see an awful crime scene.  Pretend something truly horrific just happened, and the bad guy is still on the loose, and knows everything in your file.  Steel yourself against it, and be prepared to fight it the whole, long way home.  Your family is waiting for you back in the sunlight, and this is the only way to get to them.”

“Her,” he corrects me.

“What’s that?”

“My family.  It’s just her.  My wife.”

I don’t know what to say to this.  I’ve never lost a family member, though it’s been pretty freakin’ close a few times.  Lia awkwardly pats his shoulder.

He expels his breath quickly and dashes his hand over his eyes.  He walks purposefully over to us and I flinch back, expecting something else to start hurting.  Instead, he unlocks our handcuffs.

“That wasn’t right of me.  I apologize,” he says tersely.  Ophelia and I rub our raw wrists.

“Thanks,” Lia says warmly.  “We know this can’t be easy.  You’re doin’ good, though.”

I can’t quite bring myself to thank someone for fixing a problem they caused, about an hour after it
became
a problem, but I nod along with what Lia says.

“Right, let’s get the fuck outta here, who’s with me?” I say as I head carefully towards the stairs.

I look up from the foot of them.  The stairs go around the outer walls of this tower, and from here, I can’t see the top.

“Lia?  How we doing on time?” I ask.

She consults her diamond sun, which really goes a long way to cheering this place up, if you ask me.  She does a double take at the warm glow it casts.

“It…looks like it’s approaching high noon,” she says breathlessly.

“Impossible,” I tell her.  “We’ve been here an hour, tops.”

“Not according to our sun.”

“But…we only went maybe a hundred yards!  How long were we dreaming?”

“Not very long…”  Lia says nervously.

“So, we just lost two hours?”

“I think we’ve found out why Hades was so ‘generous’ with the timeframe,” my sister replies grimly.

“Well…shit!” I mutter to no one in particular.  This suddenly feels even less possible.  If the courtyard took almost three hours to cross, how can we possibly make it up ninety floors in seven hours?  “Okay.  Well, best get hoofin’, double time, kids.”

Every step awakens some new bruise on my person.  I don’t know how many steps we climb—I stop counting after the first hundred or so.  Even thinking the numbers makes me thirsty, and as we don’t have any water, I give it up.  I can hear Lia and Kline panting behind me; so it’s not just my legs burning, then.  That’s comforting.  The steps go on and on.  Lia keeps her miniature star out as both a light source and a reminder of the time that passes.  We climb for what feels like eons, but the stone slowly illuminates and begins to dim.  By the second hour, I begin crawling.  It’s awkward with just the one hand, but it feels better on my screaming legs.  I crawl, looking only as far as the next step.  The only thing keeping me going now is the realization that if I give up, I’ll get in the way of the two people behind me, and then it will be my fault that we all failed.

I see movement in the corner of my eye—the first sign of life apart from the three of us for the past couple of hours.

“Holy fuck!”  I scream, clambering unthinkingly away from an enormous spider.  It jumps as I do, and I begin falling down the stairs, so overwhelming is my desire to distance myself from it.

“Kill it!” I cry to Lia.  Another spider begins crawling by my ear, and I can feel the soft tickle of its many legs against my neck.

“Summer, there’s nothing there!” Lia yells back.

I’m going to have a heart attack right here.  I look up, and above me are just layers and layers of webs with multi-hued arachnids skittering spastically around them, descending menacingly on fine silk.  I scream wordlessly as I try to run from them, tumbling over Lia and Detective Kline in my headlong pursuit to escape it.  As I run, I rip at my flesh, trying to remove the pincers and cobwebs I can feel moving just out of the reach of my hand.  I begin crying, desperately trying to make it stop.  My greatest fear is coming true, and it is worse even than my nightmares.  I vaguely hear my sister’s voice as an echo in the background, but it is growing fainter and fainter as I plunge down the stairway.

Then I hear her scream.

Hearing her distress stops me cold in my tracks.  I look around, shuddering and sobbing quietly, my blood rising slowly through the scratches I’ve dug into my own skin as I ran.  There are no spiders now.  I spasm slightly as the adrenaline flowing through me throws up the emergency brakes.

“No!” my sister cries.

“Phobos,” I mutter to myself.  Phobos is the incarnation of fear; to be in his presence is to taste pure horror.  Which means that Lia is now trapped in her own worst fear, or worse, by
The
Worst Fear—the
daimon
himself.

There are two kinds of terror, I think.  One is that of my arachnophobia; unthinking, irrational.  Then there is a deeper kind, the one that even your most logical mind finds too upsetting to endure, and so your thoughts skate away from them.  I hate spiders.  They send me careening off a cliff of reasonable thought.  But I can’t abide the thought of my sister being taken from me.  Worse than the thought of all eternity watching malformed legs crawl over me, is the thought of Lia in a similar position.

“I’m coming, Lia!” I yell as I begin mounting the stairs again in a sprint.  I seem to have run for quite some time.  I keep thinking that she’ll be around the next bend, but she’s not.  I will my legs to pump harder.  I start running up the steps with my hands as well, careless of my ribs and shoulder.

And then I almost run headlong into Detective Kline’s rear where he cowers on the stairs.  The spiders are back, and I can feel coherent thought slipping from me as the enormous jumping arachnids spring towards me.  I start hyperventilating again, but just then I hear Ophelia, which resolves me to push onward.  She’s fetal at the foot of a being that is unnaturally still.  His skin and robes are purest white, his eyes the only thing that show he is not a statue.  They are unadulterated blackness, moist globes of terrific nothingness.

“Let her go!” I scream, driving forward with my knife.  The spiders are closing in on us, crawling over the hand that holds my blade, peeking over his shoulder.

“It’s not real!” I yell as he blocks, and I can feel something land on my head.

“It’s not real, it’s just a demon!”  This time I aim my knife for the arachnid clinging to his robe.  An inhuman screech reverberates from the
daimon
’s mouth as the knife slides into him and I drop the blade, my adrenaline finally giving way to the jibbering panic I’ve been holding back.  Phobos looks as if he’s being sucked into the point where I’ve stabbed him, collapsing in on himself.  He screams as he dies and I fall back in terror, watching wide-eyed as he implodes.  With a pop he is gone, and so are all of his pets.  I convulse uncontrollably, my muscles all releasing in one, agonizing shudder.

I sit up, whimpering to myself, and look over to the fallen form of my sister.

“Lia?  Can you hear me?”  She’s unresponsive.  I check her pulse, and send a prayer of thanks to Persephone when it’s still there.  I grab my vial of smelling salts and wave it under her nose.  She sits up, breathing in sharply, her eyes wild as she surveys the area around her, waiting for the attack.  Finally they find me and focus.  Her face crumples into tears and she throws her hands around my neck.

“Oh, my God, Summer!” she cries.

“I know,” I tell her, stroking her hair.

“It was awful!  I saw…I saw…”

“Don’t think about it.  It wasn’t real.  It’s over now.  Nothing can get you.”  She cries harder at this, pulling away from me to bury her head in her hands, giving over to the racking sobs that consume her.  I always find that when my sister falters, that’s when I become strongest.  Even now, as crippled as I am physically, my mind is busily shoving aside its own trauma to be there as she recovers from hers.

When her tears begin to subside, I get up and go to Detective Kline, who is still mutely staring at some distant spot.

“How we doing, detective?” I ask him.

He slowly brings his gaze back to the immediate locality and drags it up to my face, tear marks tracing the grooves in his skin.

“I hate it here.”

“Eloquently said, officer,” I say with a ghost of a smile.  “Wanna see what other terrible things we can find?”

“I’m beginning to enjoy the thought of dying here, in all truth,” he says with a slight chuckle.  “I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”