bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (30 page)

And though she knew she’d meet her end, she’d waiver nevermore.

The dust hanging in the air as I reentered the cave clogged my throat and nostrils, stifling my ability to take in the great gulping breaths I needed to set my fear aside. I pulled the rough material of the demon robe I was still wearing over my nose and mouth and tried breathing through it. After a minute I was able to take enough deep, calming breaths so that I could move forward into the thick air without coughing my guts up through my mouth.

The light, which had been dim before, had become almost completely obscured by the dust in the air. As I moved more deeply into the cave and lost the light that was filtering in through the entrance, I found that I had to rely more and more on touch. I walked close to the wall on my left side so that my right hand, which clutched the knife I’d pulled from Emo, would be free if I needed it. A few yards into the passageway, I became aware of a strange whirring noise. I followed the sound and soon found myself entering the cavern again. What I saw there brought me to a horrified stop.

The air at the top of the cavern was alive with something that darted back and forth in silvery flashes. I tucked myself back into the shadows and squinted upward. Although the shapes that danced above my head had a familiar feel, they were indistinct and moved much too quickly for me to recognize them. Like fireflies around a bright white light, they flitted here and there and shot away from the occasional fire bolt which flew at them from somewhere among the mass of bodies which littered the cavern floor.

The whirring sound I’d heard appeared to be coming from the fireflies in the sky. I also began to notice another sound. It was pitched low in both tone and volume, so that it almost blended into the background of my mind and ran unnoticed through my thoughts. But once identified, the sound brought my stomach into my throat. It was one of those entrancing chants that had left me helpless and as immobile as concrete in my own home.

The chanting didn’t originate from the things above my head. It was coming from the center of the cavern.

As if touched by a fresh current of swiftly moving air, the murk at the center of the cavern cleared away and I saw a tall figure standing upon the altar. He was naked, with his arms raised high above his head. Although his back was to me, I suspected that the chants were emanating from him. As I squinted to see who it was, the figure turned around and I gasped.

A pale blue gaze cut the dusty air and locked onto me in my hidden niche. The piercing gaze glowed through the murk, pulling me forward like a siren song of old. It sent a chill of cold apprehension down my spine.

Prince Nille’s voice carried through the dead atmosphere of that underground horror land and stabbed at my ears like needles made of ice. I wrapped my hands around my arms, momentarily forgetting the knife I clutched in one of them.

“So you return, lovely Astra. A pity your young Prince is dead. And even sadder that he called to you as he died. But alas, it appears that you were too preoccupied to answer him.”

Since it did me no good to hide in the shadows I stepped out and faced him across hundreds of slaughtered corpses. I stiffened my spine and dropped my knife hand to my side, but I didn’t drop the knife. I lifted my chin in defiance.

I’d apparently been chosen for that moment...to deal with the greatest evil I’d ever encountered. And though I hadn’t the foggiest what I was supposed to do against a creature as powerful as the very scary young devil prince, I knew it would be unveiled to me in due course. So, for the moment, I stood, if not tall then at least resolute before him. “I guess it’s just you and me then, Nille. Pity you don’t have more help.”

He laughed. The chanting dropped off and the cavern was silent, but for the whispery sound of the fireflies above. The room had grown extremely cold too, I noticed. And it smelled like a butcher shop. “You are very small to be so cocky, Astra. And I am very big.”

“Yeah, yeah. And you have such big teeth, gramma. I’m sure you’re gonna kill me, Nille, but I plan to take a chunk out of you before I go down.”

His smile stayed in place as he hopped lightly down from the altar. Watching him move toward me, I suddenly realized that the shimmery figures had all fluttered over to perch on the ledge above our heads, where Emo and I had first observed the goings on in that disgusting cavern. My eyes were immediately drawn to the figure at the center and narrowed on the golden haired angel whose scowling countenance was all the body language I had to go on as a clue to her feelings.
Take care, Astra
.

Help me.

I felt rather than saw Myra shake her head.
We are not allowed to affect the course of things that will be. Know only that, once that course has been determined, we will stand for you.

Gee...thanks a bunch.

Trust me when I tell you my heart is splitting in two.

Let’s just hope that’s all that gets split in two here.

Amen.

My eyes had never left Nille as Myra and I shuffled mental drawers. He was moving across the cavern on long, elegant legs. As his feet slid forward, bodies flew away from them to clear his path. He still carried the golden aura I’d noticed earlier, only I was no longer pleased by it. Prince Nille was one powerful and evil sonofabitch and he was coming for me.
Shit
.

I cast my eyes around the cavern for some ideas. Nothing came to me but I did notice a few dead royals I recognized. Dialle’s people. My heart did a quick jump that left behind a wave of nausea and I forced myself not to examine my reaction too closely right at that moment.
Dialle
. He’d called out to me and I’d blown him off. If he was dead, could I live with that?

Where was he? Was he lying somewhere on the cavern floor? Just another mangled body among a multitude of torn and twisted corpses? My eyes scoured the cavern of cadavers, looking for survivors. The dead royals and many of the dead around them, appeared to have been sucked dry. Their bodies, hunched and pale, had collapsed inward under gray, ashy looking skin.

A fire bolt hit the doorway just inches from my face and I realized I’d have to deal with my reaction later.

Much later.

Run
! The thought wasn’t mine and I didn’t have time to figure out whose it was. The singed feeling on my cheek and the explosion in my ear jolted me out of my daze. I ran in the direction that would carry me away from Nille, but since the cavern was circular I really couldn’t get out of view.

He simply changed direction, still walking at a normal pace, though I knew he could probably cover the distance between us in a fraction of a second. He was secure, confidant, not at all worried about me. I hate that in an enemy. It always encourages me to excel.

As I ran around the edge of the cavern, jumping over the dead husks of bad guys from the various courts as I went, I probed the core of my power and tested it. Gone was my earlier reluctance to pull it out again. I was fighting for my life and even more than that. For all I knew I was fighting for the whole of humankind. It sure seemed like a lot of shit to dump on one, pissed off little halfling. Hades, life just wasn’t fair.

I stopped when I’d put the length of the cavern between us and stood panting as my eyes sought Nille’s. He’d stopped too, and was smiling at me. Apparently he’d tired of the cat and rodent game and was ready to nibble on my poor, rodent-sized body. I wasn’t going to let him have that nibble if I could stop it.

Although I wanted to run like hell from that place, retrieve Emo and return to my relatively quiet and marginally uneventful prior existence, I knew that option wasn’t open to me. But if I was going to fight I needed to pick the right place. Something was drawing me back to that altar. While emotionally it was the last place I wanted to go, I figured there must be some reason I was being drawn to it so I gave in to the pull.

I narrowed my eyes at Nille and, surprisingly, I saw the beginnings of his movement toward me. I knew that within a breathlessly short period of time he’d be standing next to me and I reacted. I gathered my magic quickly and, with a whir of light and sound, I was suddenly teetering on the edge of the altar. I’m sure if I could have seen my face as I fought for my balance I would have laughed at the look of shock and surprise there. Apparently I’d gained the ability to shimmer and spaceshift from Dialle. Again came the clench in my heart that I had to push away.

When I looked up, Nille was standing where I’d been. His face was no longer smug. In fact, the pale blue eyes had narrowed to showcase his anger. Oh hell. Now I’d pissed of the bogeyman. I realized I still had my power gathered around me and I decided to expand it, use it as a protection as I’d done with Rayanne.

Across the room Nille tensed in the first movement of what I recognized as a spaceshift and I poured everything into my protective bubble to hold him off. He hit my protective wall and I instinctively closed my eyes. His brittle laughter pried them open.

“Your tiny powers are nothing to me, Astra.”

“Oh yeah. Have you seen the lovely Rayanne since she got on my bad side?”

A flash of anger darkened the pale eyes before he could stop it. Then he shrugged and the cold smile he wore on his face widened. “Surely you don’t think she was as powerful as me?”

“As I. Always use good grammar when boasting about your ability to eat an enemy. They’ll take you more seriously.” I gave him a smile of my own and then shimmered to a spot just behind him.

As soon as my feet hit the ground I dropped the protective bubble and redirected the power to stab it into him like a psychic sword. It entered his back between the golden shoulder blades and cut a path through his flesh with a sizzle and a snap of bone. The tip of the energy blade emerged from the front of his chest like a bolt of lightning. He cried out once and then his shoulders rounded, his arms arcing as he seemed to draw into himself for the space of a heartbeat. He straightened and the shimmering blade shot away from him, ejected from his body. It flew back toward me and I dove for the floor as it whizzed over my head.

The moment I hit the pile of bodies beneath us, I rolled and flipped back onto my feet. His hand shot toward me but I remembered how he’d disintegrated the demon that had jumped on me earlier and had a lot of incentive to avoid his touch. I sprang upward, achieving a surprising height of more than ten feet and landed again on the altar. I was instantly aware of a new tingling sensation rising up into my legs. Magic, like tiny explosions of vigor in my blood, burst through me and I was jittery with power. I realized that the altar had somehow absorbed an incredible amount of energy and it was making itself available to me.

Hey, I’m not proud. I’ll take all the help I can get. Even from a rock.

There was a pale, fragile corpse lying across one end of the altar. My senses recognized her before my eyes did. Like the other royals I’d seen, Queen Kaline’s body appeared to have been sucked completely dry. I felt a stab of pain looking at her, but I didn’t have time to think about what it all meant.

Nille strode toward the altar, his golden, muscular arms lifted above his head. The blue of his chilling eyes throbbed with energy and something else. I didn’t stay around to find out what he had in mind. I shimmered away and ended up on the ledge above his head with the angels. For a moment Nille lost track of me. Watching his pulsing, blue gaze ripping the cavern apart looking for poor little ol’ me, I shivered. It wouldn’t be good when he found me. He looked royally torqued.

I shrank back into the shadows to think. I knew I had maybe seconds, not much more. For the first time I realized the ledge was littered with bodies in addition to the wide-eyed angels.

Myra and the other angels stood in a semi-circle around a dark mound that had probably once been alive. A jolt of cold dread speared through me as I caught Myra’s eye and I knew. It was Dialle. And the angels were protecting him.

My eyes swung to Nille and he was no longer standing where I’d left him. Cold, raw fear crept through my chest but I knew what I had to do. Running to Dialle, I knelt down beside him. He was lying on his side, crumpled like a broken rag doll. He wasn’t moving even a little bit but something about his face gave me hope. I touched his neck and felt nothing. I dropped my face to his and said a silent prayer that I would feel breath upon my cheeks. Nothing.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nille shimmer to a spot about ten feet away. Almost instinctively, the angels closed ranks around us and began to swell with light. A warm nimbus emanated from the encircled angels and vibrated against my skin. The circle of light was filled with an energy that was pure power. They’d covered us with protection. My eyes flew to Myra’s and she frowned.

“For the moment he will not breach our protective wall. The goodness within it would burn his skin like acid. But he is powerful, Astra. He will not be stopped for long.”

“What should I do?”

Myra shrugged. “That is for you and Dialle to determine.”

It was my turn to frown. Dialle was dead. Wasn’t he? In desperation I reached up and touched the mating mark at my throat. It began to throb as I touched it. Almost immediately I felt a shift in my mental drawers. The merest whisper only. He was so weak. Guilt washed over me. I’d let him down when he’d needed me and I’d surely let him die.

Tears ran down my cheeks as I dropped to the ground and placed my forehead against his, thinking his name with everything I had in me.
Dialle! I need your help to fight Nille. Don’t leave me...please!

Nothing. I continued to plead with him mentally for several long moments. Sitting back with a frustrated curse, I clenched my fists and let the tears that had been burning my eyes fall. I felt the angels’ eyes on me but I couldn’t look up at them. It was over. I’d failed. Nille would win.

My hand reached out and brushed a long tangle of silky hair from Dialle’s face. He was terrifyingly pale. He looked like a cold, porcelain statue on the dirt floor. So beautiful. So perfect. So cold to the touch.