The Wrath of Angels (Eternal Warriors Book 3) Page 4

  “Get off me, you disgusting little beast!” The daemoness uttered a few choice words that would have surely blown her disguise as she scraped the Vile off her leg with her free foot and viciously booted it into the wall, where it splattered like a squashed grape. She glanced back at Robin, as if daring him to find any humor in the incident, and both Robin and Worm wisely pretended that they hadn’t seen anything.

  They continued down the hall without further interruption. Lahalissa told him to wait for a minute before following him around the corner into what appeared to be the demon’s lair and moments after counting to sixty, he found himself standing in a comfortable, well-lit room. There were several couches, two wide-screen televisions, a DVD player, and a large refrigerator. Nor were they alone; one demonic guard was greeting Lahalissa with all the enthusiasm of a puppy whose owner had been absent for a month, the other was studiously ignoring the couple in favor of what looked like the Bloomberg channel. He did not seem overly interested in Robin’s intrusion either.

  This close, it was impossible not to feel the seal. Its raw power sent shivers through him. Could they truly break it? It was on the south wall, perpendicular to the two plasma screens. “So, how’s the market doing,” he asked the horned demon on the couch, not really knowing what else to do but make conversation. He didn’t want to make his move before Lahalissa made hers.

  “Dow’s up a hundred. And me short, don’t you know!”

  “What, you’re day trading?” He was incredulous. Maybe Heaven was right to throw us out, ye gods, just look at how far we have fallen! “What do you care?”

  “It passes the time and Vegas ain’t on TV. What’s it to you?”

  Belatedly, he recalled that he was supposed to be a nosy Divine interloper, not a jaded Fallen angel. “Because gambling is wrong,” he waggled a finger at the demon, who exposed a fine set of razor-sharp fangs when he yawned.

  “Whatever. By the way, who are you and why are you bothering me?”

  Robin pointed to the other two spirits. The tall demon, whose awkward length made him look rather like a gawky teenage mortal, was nodding at something Lahalissa was saying. “She shouldn’t be involving herself with the likes of him. I came to tell him that.”

  “Oh.” The sitting demon lost interest and turned back towards the television. “So tell him already.”

  Lahalissa was an accomplished actress. Her eyes widened as she turned towards him at the sound of his approach, her mouth made a perfect circle of astonishment and she leaned into her demonic suitor as if she were in dire need of protection. Her actions not only convinced her would-be lover, but emboldened Orolin enough that he put a long, spike-lined arm around her slender shoulders and actually jutted out his elongated jaw.

  “Who are you,” he demanded boldly.

  Robin puffed out his chest and struck a pose, laying his hand on his sword belt which, he reminded himself, was only an illusion. “I am Ar-Thundar, the True, and this Guardian is one of my cohorts. Unhand her, vile demon, for her heavenly purity is not to be sullied!”

  Orolin blinked, but he was not about to back down in front of Lahalissa. He stepped in front of the demoness as he put his hand to his own scabbard, which looked as if it held something more akin to a meat cleaver than a sword, and puffed out his chest. His elongated limbs no longer looked awkward, but dangerously long, and for all Lahalissa’s earlier contempt, Robin saw that this demon was designed for fighting. Perhaps he’d overdone the confrontational tone after all.

  “I think the lady will be the judge of that!” He glanced back at Lahalissa, who managed a convincing blush. “Back off, angel, this place is endowed with wards which strengthen me beyond what you would believe possible. But since you are a companion of the one I love, I shall permit you to depart in peace, if you leave now.”

  Robin raised both hands, his palms exposed, and began to retreat. He tried to look chagrined, and pleaded with Lahalissa, even as he moved closer to the demon on the couch. “Please, my dear, reconsider. To fall from Grace is an awful thing. I know your feelings are strong for this… this fallen one, but you must not do this!”

  Orolin’s face was twitching as he tried not to openly smirk, as Lahalissa shook her head and pushed her way past him to confront Robin. She placed her hands in his and smiled sadly. As she did, he could feel one of her palms begin to grow warm with an enchantment of sorts.

  “My dear captain, I thank you, but my love is too strong. But though we must be enemies, let there nevertheless be peace between us.” She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek and whispered a single word. “Now!”

  When she released his hands, Robin twisted and drew a black-flame dagger from his belt. He drove it into the throat of the unsuspecting demon sitting behind him, then leaped sideways to avoid the monster’s instinctive reaction. The beast was incredibly strong, though, and despite the knife in his throat, he was able to stagger to his taloned feet just in time to receive a hard kick to his unarmored midsection. As he doubled over, Robin stabbed him in the back of the neck with his other blade, and that was finally enough to finish him. With a wailing, goat-like groan, the demon exploded in a sulfuric green-yellow flash.

  Robin turned to see if Lahalissa needed any help, but she was already standing over the unconscious body of Orolin staring at him with an expression of disgust. Her demon lover was snoring loudly thanks to a sleep-inducing rune that she’d slapped on his forehead, but he was otherwise unharmed.

  “Oh, you… stupid! You didn’t have to kill him!”

  “What, he’s immortal!”

  “You know what I mean. Anyhow, so much for sneaking in, Thundar. You’d better find that seal fast, before his life-ward brings about a thousand slayers down on our heads. I’ll go get the mortal.”

  He was about to point out that Worm wasn’t any more properly mortal than her, when he realized that he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Life-wards?”

  Lahalissa pointed to the first guard’s head, which unlike the rest of him, had not disintegrated but was hurled by the explosion over to the far side of the room, and was lying underneath the plasma screen. To Robin’s horror, a red sigil was flashing ominously between the horns jutting from the demon’s forehead. Gehenna! Realizing she was right and that they had very little time, he closed his eyes, laid his hands on the southern wall, and quickly stripped the masking spell that hid the seal from prying eyes.

  Whoosh!

  He grunted as the purple flames of the encircled seven-pointed star hurled him backwards and he struck the cement floor hard enough to make him groan. Why couldn’t he ever remember to jump out of the cursed material in time, he grumbled as he pushed himself up to marvel at the great seal. It was huge, more than thirty feet in diameter, and each fiery tine was marked with an individual sigil inscribed in silver. In the middle was an eighth sigil, but inlaid with gold. It was one that he had seen many times before, the mark that belonged to Albion’s curse, the Midas of madness.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he protested, pointing at the flashing head when Lahalissa returned with Worm in tow.

  “I never dreamed you wouldn’t know. The Mad One is crazy, but he’s not stupid, Robin. Oh, but well done, you’ve found it!” But he took little pleasure in her delight when he looked at the head and saw its eyes, which were now open. They were glazed over and possessed no sign of consciousness, but something must have been controlling them because they first looked over Robin, then turned their lifeless gaze on Lahalissa, then Worm. “Someone’s watching us!”

  “Then we better get on with it. There it is,” Robin pointed to the great fiery seal and clapped a hand on Worm’s shoulder. “Can you do it?”

  “Assuredly.”

  Worm reached into his mouth, and with a quick jerk, ripped out one of his canines. Robin groaned, and then had to look away as his tall companion, betraying no pain, pursed his lips and spat out a red gobbet from the side of his mouth. But Lahalissa gasped, and when he looked back, he
saw that the tooth had somehow grown into a great ivory sword, with an intricately carved handle that resembled a dragon.

  “I believe it will serve,” Worm said, offering it to him hilt-first. “Just stab directly into the heart of the seal. Use both hands….”

  “What are you,” asked Lahalissa in awe, but they both ignored her. Robin balanced the sword in his hands, surprised at its heavy weight, then lifted it behind his right shoulder like a giant dagger and drove it into the center of the flaming rock. To his surprise, it slid into the gold sigil as if the seal was a scabbard designed for it, and the purple flames flared, then began to change colour. First blue, then green, then red, until they finally faded to a sickly yellow fire that finally fizzled into nothing. The silver sigils melted, then drizzled down the wall into a metallic puddle, but when Robin withdrew the sword, he saw that the Mad One’s molten sign now gilded the sword’s blade.

  “Brilliant,” he said, amazed. He bowed respectfully and offered the sword to Worm, who took it without a word and held it at his side.

  Denuded of all magic, the rock wall began to shudder, then a large portion began to slide away, revealing a murky chamber of vast dimensions. The air was oppressive with wards and spells, and Robin did not like to think of how many alarms they were probably setting off even as they entered. Lahalissa snapped her fingers; nothing happened. Nonplussed, she stared at her fingers and snapped them again. Nothing.

  Robin frowned and tried a light-making spell of his own. “Fiat lux!” It failed too, and he shared a look of concern with Lahalissa. Only Worm seemed untroubled, though he was craning his head around and looking up at the impenetrable darkness in which the high ceilings were shaded.

  “There’s something up there,” he said calmly.

  They stopped. There was the faint sound of something scrabbling in the gloom high above them. Robin’s skin began to crawl, and his uncertainty bloomed into full-flowered fear when he tried to shift into a higher shadow and found that he could not. The wards were unthinkably powerful, never before had he experienced such awesome might.

  “It’s a trap,” he shouted. “Get back!”

  But as he turned and started to run for the door, something shot out of the darkness, something shining and ominously gossamer, and blocked the door. He froze, recognizing the shimmering silk of a spider’s web. Judging by the large strands, though, it was an extraordinarily large spider. The sword! Worm had it, and surely it would slash through this stuff easily enough, magic or no magic.

  Before he could call for the weapon, though, Lahalissa screamed, and he turned around in time to see a massive dark shape plunging from the shadows above. Somehow, it arrested its fall, and there it hung, seemingly suspended in mid-air, a giant spider with ferocious mandibles clacking portentously not three feet away from her.

  It was a dreadful creature, five, perhaps six times wider than Robin was tall, with huge hairy legs, a disgusting cluster of eyes and a grotesque, bulbous body. But what made Robin weak in the knees with shock, fear and horror was neither the spider’s great size nor even the noxious odor emanating from it. For above the ocular cluster was a noble set of antlers, and beneath them was a face he had known many centuries before, a face that belonged to one for whom he had been searching ever since Albion’s fall. Set amidst the shaggy spider-fur was the handsome face of Herne the Hunter.

  Chapter 4

  Sing, Children, Sing

  And I feel like I’m being eaten by a thousand million shivering furry holes. And I know that in the morning I will wake up in the shivering cold. And the Spiderman is always hungry.

  —The Cure, (“Lullaby”)

  The nightmarish abomination chittered. It flexed its horny mandibles slowly back and forth, and raised two black-furred legs in a threatening manner. The massive horror was a bestial vision from the Pit, but the most dreadful thing about it was the blank, mindless look in Herne’s unmistakable eyes. There was no sign of the fallen angel-prince therein, no glimmer of the once-feared leader of the Wild Hunt. Indeed, if there was still so much as a flicker of intelligence lurking somewhere behind those owlish golden orbs, it appeared to have been swept away long ago by a devil-cursed maelstrom of insanity.

  “Herne, what did they do to you?” Robin cried out, more in shock than fear.

  “It can’t be the Hunter,” protested Lahalissa as she slowly backed away from the stinking atrocity. She recognized him, too. “That’s not possible!”

  Only Worm managed to remain calm; he did not flinch even when a huge leg brushed over his face and the grotesque eye cluster turned in his direction.

  “The one you call Herne is still in there, somewhere,” he called out to the others. “I can feel him.”

  “Herne!” Robin shouted, forcing himself to step closer to the thing. “Can you hear me? Who did this to you? Was it the Mad One? Do you know how we can break the spell?”

  “The spell?” Robin froze as the lips moved on the embedded face. The voice was strangely high-pitched, almost childishly querulous, but it was recognizably the Hunter’s. “Oh, there are no spells here, my dear friends. Mmmmm, the fires burn brightly. Such sweet little embers. So suck-suck-succulent, yes…no! No, it is not permitted, oh no, indeed, it is not.”

  The Hunter was there, true, but whatever was left of him was mad, Robin realized. He had been a friend once. Well, more one with whom Robin would have liked to be friends, but in any case, not an enemy.

  “Herne, Great Lord, we want to help you. Tell us how we can free you!”

  The angelic face seemed to tilt sideways within the mass of stinking fur, and Robin felt a wave of nausea threaten to overcome him. It was almost impossible to imagine that it was the face of one of Faerie’s greatest lords.

  “Free? No, not free. Not free, not me. But free to feed, dear, clever friend. Free to feed. Like diamonds, oh yes, the juice, the flame, the sweet devilfire shines within you.”

  Robin did not like the direction this conversation was taking, nor did he take much comfort in the increasingly excited way the spider-thing was rubbing its legs together. He had no way of knowing if Herne was trapped inside the monstrous outrage or if he had been melded with it in such a way that the angel-lord was basically no more. But whatever the truth, it was beyond his skill to diagnose, much less cure, and there was nothing he could do about it except edge closer to Worm and hope that the ivory sword would have the same effect on the demonic arachnid as it had on the Mad One’s seal.

  “Is this a friend of yours?” Worm asked Robin, thoughtfully twirling the weapon in his hand as he regarded the monster.

  “I don’t know if I’d call him a friend, exactly.”

  “So you won’t have any objections if I kill it?”

  “I’ll survive any regrets.”

  Herne’s face grew slack again, but before the light of intelligence completely faded again from his eyes, his lips twitched into a smirking smile. “Killing, killing, the fare unwilling. And yet, the dear darlings must eat, yes?”

  As quickly as it had appeared, the spider vanished abruptly, somewhere in the darkness above them.

  “What did it mean by that?” Lahalissa asked. She looked apprehensive, and Robin did not blame her in the least. “Darlings? You don’t really think that was Herne, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Hmmm,” Worm mused aloud.

  “Shhh,” Robin urged.

  There was a faint scrabbling sound, somewhere to the left of him. Or was it actually to the right? He turned slowly, seeing nothing, but trying to get a fix on the direction of the noise. “There’s something… that way.”

  “And that way,” Lahalissa was pointing in the opposite direction.

  “In front too,” added Worm.

  And, Robin realized to his horror, behind them as well. For when he looked back towards the door, he saw five or ten spider-things each the size of a large dog and in each was embedded the face of the spell-cursed Hunter.

  “I don’t suppo
se it would do much good to tell them I’m not an angel, at this point?” Worm commented. Robin felt an irrational burst of anger at his strange companion for his apparent lack of fear. Lahalissa was pressed up behind him, and he was pretty sure that her fingernails had drawn flame from his arms, which she was clutching tightly.

  “If you’re not going to do anything, at least give me the blasted sword!”

  “I can’t imagine that it will suffice.” Worm shrugged, but he handed it to Robin anyhow. “But have at it, if you like.”

  Robin lunged at the nearest spider as it came closer; it screamed in a horribly angelic voice as the sword pierced it before curling up and expiring, its legs kicking madly. But its demise did nothing to intimidate its fellows, indeed, if anything they were more excited than before. They were whispering between themselves, conversing in a bizarre combination of spiderish chitters and semi-discernible speech. He struck twice more, but the creatures now recognized the danger of the blade and he was only able to sever a single leg from one of the slower spiders. And they crept closer… even in the dim light he could see there were dozens of the abominable things, surrounding them on all sides.

  “Worm, you don’t happen to have any more tricks, do you? This isn’t working!”

  Lahalissa shrieked as one bold spider-child leaped at her, and Robin spun around in time to see her smashing her fist into the terrible mockery of Herne’s face. There was a crunching sound as purple ichor burst from its nose, but although the thing screamed, its claws did not release her and it used its long legs to pull her into its hungry embrace. Robin brought the sword around in a lethal arc that slashed the monster in half, killing it instantly, but any hope that its demise would intimidate its brethren was immediately dashed. There was a brief moment of silence, and then, the terrible brood attacked.

  Robin was not quite sure what happened next. One minute, he was being engulfed in a hairy, stinking mass of arachnid abomination. Only seconds later, everything was heat, light and flame. Somewhere above him, but nearby, there was the unmistakable roar of fire, an explosive whoosh followed by chittering screams and the crackle of things set alight. He threw an elbow at the monster that was on top of him, trying to pin him down to the floor, then ran it through and leaped to his feet. It was a beautifully horrible sight.