Wolves and the River of Stone (37 page)

Bubbles and Peanut charged, smashing through parts of the wooden fence that were still standing. Their long ears were plastered against their rippling backs as they pounded toward the necromancers between us and the demon. Their green bodies glowed with a white light and I could see them pulling tiny bits of life force in from everything around them. It flowed in tiny green streams from the trees and the earth and even the necromancers they were about to assault. The cu siths grew in an explosion of light and green fire, and when the now pony-sized Bubbles and Peanut fell upon the necromancers, I finally understood why they made good guard dogs.

The first necromancer was still blinking furiously after the flash of power when Bubbles’s jaws closed around his head and snapped it off. Peanut landed on the next victim claws first. Blood and entrails exploded from the body. Another tried to raise her hand and throw something. Bubble’s tongue lashed out and wrapped around the hand while Peanut knocked the necromancer to the ground and crushed her head with two vicious rabbit thumps of his hind legs.

“
Cu siths?”
Philip said as he dropped his shield, stepped forward, and raised his arm. “You underestimate me.
Inimicus deiciotto!”

The wave of force hit Bubbles and Peanut mid-stride. There was a horrible crunch as they ran headlong into it and were thrown about fifty feet through the air. I didn’t see where they came down. I’d learned my lesson from the soulstone distraction, but I could have sworn I heard Zola laugh.

“You shouldn’t have left the circle,” she said. I found her at the tree line, wearing an awful smile behind the line of surviving necromancers.

Philip’s eyes widened as he looked down and tried to take a step back into the circle of power, but Zola was too fast. Her cane whipped forward

“
Tyranno Eversiotto!”

Philip screamed as the torrent of devastation sent bodies and earth into the air and blasted him twenty feet away from his precious shield. He fell somewhere behind Prosperine and Vassili. The demon finally caught up with the vampire. Vassili grunted as he took another airborne trip across the field. He bounced off the ground near Sam and Vik and rolled into the northwestern woods beyond them.

I raised my gun and shot the demon in the head. It spared me a glance before turning away, heading toward Sam again. Dammit. The lights in its eye sockets flared and pulsed. I charged it. I didn’t get there before Carter.

The khaki wolf came from the southern line of trees, near Aideen. Carter leapt and his jaws closed on Prosperine’s shoulder. His muzzle and forearms were thick with blood and viscera. I heard him growl as Prosperine pulled him off her shoulder, leaving ragged wounds in the demon’s red flesh.

The lights in Prosperine’s eye sockets flared before she punched through Carter’s chest. Her hand came back with a bloody, beating heart as the wolf jerked once and dropped to the cold ground, dead.

“
Carter!”
I heard Maggie’s scream before I saw the silver wolf, following the same trail her husband had carved. She leapt over her fallen mate and the sound that came out of her mouth sent shivers down my spine.

“Maggie, stop!” Zola was running after the wolf. There was nothing she could do.

Prosperine caught the silver wolf in mid-leap and tore her arm off. The wolf howled and writhed in the demon’s grip, biting the demon’s arm again and again. The world slowed as Prosperine pulled her arm back and punched through Maggie’s chest with a crack. The demon pulled out Maggie’s heart and swallowed it before the dead wolf even hit the ground.

My body shook as I stared at the unmoving bodies of the wolves. My friends. Rage swelled. Rage powered a step forward. Rage flared my necromancy. I lost control of it. The dead came to me and I went to them. Some of them had been priests, some were children, some were murderers, some were mothers, and then I lit upon something else. Something distant, and vast, and terrible. I began to see flashes, a woman tied on top of my back, a girl, my daughter, she screamed as the men cut her. Soldiers, ancient soldiers. The vision cut off.
Don’t go there son, you don’t want to see that. Take this power, save your master, save Adannaya.
Another flood of power washed back through the ley lines until I thought my body would ignite. The last soul I touched, I knew. I knew her and she knew me. She showed me the cursed bayonet the fallen smith had made for her. She showed me Mike the Demon in the Civil War, the Union uniform he wore, the hammer he carried, the love she carried for him. Mike’s little necromancer. She was a practitioner of the fallen arts and her knowledge came to my mind like a series of photographs. What changed Mike the Demon? What was changing Nixie? What did Maggie die for? The love and protection flowing through Carter and Maggie’s auras still hung in the air. I didn’t think. I didn’t think about the consequences. I didn’t think about how it would work. I just
knew
it would. It would kill me, but the demon would be dead. And that’s all that fucking mattered.

I screamed and my necromancy flashed out to Carter and Maggie. Their bodies stood as I ordered them to and their souls wound back around the corpses as a needle of my power stitched them back together. The images of their lives and love and past flooded my brain until I was blinded in a hysterical rage.

And as I felt their loss, and their fear of death, their fear at what I was doing, they saw
exactly
what I intended to do. Both of their lifeless bodies turned gaping chest cavities to me and said, “Do it.”

I pulled the focus from my belt and ran between my two dead friends. They grabbed my legs and hurled me at Prosperine with ungodly strength. As Carter and Maggie released their grip, I pulled their auras and their souls into my own with a soulart and channeled it all through the focus. My arms strained as I pulled back and swung a soulsword, the blade of a dark necromancer, in a vicious arc. It passed through Prosperine like she wasn’t even there. I smashed into the left side of the demon’s body and it fell away in a spray of black tar and gore. I thought the impact would kill me, but my body still moved. I stood up and struck again, cleaving her head in two between the fading lights of her eye sockets before I struck again, and again. There was nothing left by the time I felt the sting on my back. I didn’t even know what hit me, but blood was coursing out of a wound below my right shoulder. I ran my hand though the warm flow and rubbed my fingers together. Rage took hold again and I turned toward the line of necromancers.

I felt something coming before the inky cloud oozed out of the ground in front of me and congealed into another gravemaker. A grin twisted my face and I raised the soulsword in my hand to strike it down.

Use it.

I heard Carter’s voice in my head and I screamed.

Use the gravemaker.

Maggie’s voice vibrated through my blasted mind.

Right and wrong didn’t matter anymore. Only revenge. Only death. I reached out for the gravemaker with my necromancy. Someone screamed and distantly I thought it was Sam. The blood loss was taking its toll, but Maggie and Carter pushed me on. They stayed with me in that sea of insanity. Carter told me he was proud. He’d been watching me a long time. His father had known my grandfather, knew Zola. He’d been ordered by the Watchers to keep an eye on me. Maggie was glad she’d known me.
Kill Philip, any way you can.
Maggie wanted him dead. I wanted him dead too. I didn’t flinch as the flood of screaming souls and death and horror flooded my body when my necromancy tore into the gravemaker. A single thought could have dismantled the monster, but I had worse things to do that night. I turned my hand over into a claw and sent the gravemaker after the other necromancers.

They didn’t realize what had happened until it was far, far too late.

The gravemaker’s rough hand closed over a necromancer’s hood and the crack of his skull echoed across the field. Some tried to run. A few disappeared into the woods, only to be chased by enormous green blurs. The rest just died.

My voice sounded like the dead as I turned on Philip.
“PINKERTON!”

Philip’s astonishment cracked into a laugh. It was a dark, twisted thing. He held up a shield as he backed away. “Just like me, Vesik. Just like me. You’ll never see it coming, just like this.” Philip pulled a hand of glory out of his cloak and waved it through the air. Reality screamed as a portal formed into the Warded Ways. Philip backed into it after Volund, Jamin, and Zachariah fled before him. The oily wound vanished from mid-air with a snap.

Sobs wracked my body as I fell to the ground in a heap. I let go of Carter and Maggie. I didn’t want to. I wanted to put them back together. Bring them back. Make things right. I heard their ghostly whispers as they said goodbye.

Mike the Demon stood over me with the Smith’s Hammer. The flames still rippled across it as he said, “She spoke to you.” I looked up at the demon and then lowered my head. He blew out a breath before he said, “What are you?”

And for the first time, I worried that Philip Pinkerton could be right.

I
hear the aftermath of the battle at Stones River was eventually added to the Watchers’ handbook as an example of how to clean up a really, really, really big mess. As for our little group, Nixie and her fellow water witches left to report to their Queen. I didn’t even get to hear their names before Nixie kissed me and disappeared into the shallow river. Aideen healed Foster and Cara as soon as the area was clear before healing the worst of my injuries. Foster healed the wolves and I was surprised when Hugh offered his blood to help heal the vampires. The other wolves followed suit, albeit less enthusiastically. It was left to Cara to heal the wolves again once the vampires had finished.

“I thought Philip used a hand of glory,” Mary said as we walked through the trails of Stones River battlefield. We’d been slow to leave the area. I don’t think anyone fully grasped what the hell had just happened. The sun was barely starting to peek above the horizon.

“No, it wasn’t a hand of glory,” Zola said. “It was the hand of a dead king.”

Cara cursed and kicked a chunk of a demolished necromancer off the side of the trail. “Nameless King, still you haunt us.”

Hugh was in front of me, carrying Carter in his arms and Vik walked beside him with Maggie. We found a quiet tree in the cemetery along the northern wall. Hugh laid the bodies side by side with their arms around each other. He was shaking when he stood up.

“I’ll miss them,” Hugh said. “He was a good Alpha.”

“The best,” Alan said.

Foster held out his hand and I gave him my staff. He dragged the ferrule in a circle around the bodies. “S
omes reverto terra,”
he said and brought the ferrule of the staff down in the center of the circle. A murky grayish light flashed around the bodies before the earth churned and swallowed Carter and Maggie. We left them there, buried together on the battlefield at Stones River.

“Rest well, silver wolf,” Vassili said.

A small smile quirked Hugh’s lips as he turned away with his arm around Haka’s shoulder.

We piled into the van a while later and headed back to the highway. Peanut stuffed himself between the front seats. The cu siths shrank a little, but not much. Bubbles was sprawled across Alan, Dominic, and an empty seat. No one talked much between the stops for gas and fast food. I stared at my hands and struggled to smile when Sam or Zola tapped my arm every now and again.

“You killed a demon,” Zola said. “Aside from us, no one knows what you used to do it, and no one ever needs to know. You’re not like him.”

A thin smile cracked my lips. “That easy to read, huh?”

“Yep,” Sam said.

“Damian, you are a spirit warrior unlike any I have ever heard of,” Hugh said as he glanced at me in the rearview. “I know Carter would understand what you did, and I think the rest of us should follow his example.”

I knew Carter understood. I don’t think I could have gone through with it if he and Maggie hadn’t told me to. The shadows of the highway rolled by as I looked out the window and contemplated why that didn’t make me feel better about doing it.

“Get over it,
da?”
Vassili said. “It is miracle so many of us are alive.” He was huddled in the back of the van beside Vik and Mary and Haka. He looked miserable.

Mike pushed Peanut’s huge furry head down between the front seats so he could turn and meet my eyes. “This may not mean much, coming from a demon, but you did the right thing. I don’t care whose rules you broke. If Prosperine was loosed on this world ...” He shook his head. “Carter and Maggie died for the good of their pack and even the good of this entire world. I can’t think of a more noble death.”

Hugh was nodding his head from the driver’s seat.

“Thanks, Mike. It means a lot.”

The fallen smith smiled and turned back to the road. His head snapped back to me and he said, “Oh, and if I catch you talking to my little necromancer again, I’ll cut your balls off.”

Everyone laughed. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t joyous, but it was laughter.

***

Ashley cried for almost an hour when Hugh and I told her about Carter and Maggie. Hugh wanted me, Sam, and the fairies to be there when he told Ashley. I wasn’t sure why until he hugged her, stepped away, and opened his mouth.