Derik's Bane (19 page)

“We just needed some blood to complete the spell,” Surprisingly Reasonable Robed Guy explained. “It was the last thing. We’ve spent years collecting the other ingredients. And she
is
a foul sorceress. We didn’t want to take any chances.”

“Which, since she accidentally killed all the bad guys, wasn’t the worst plan, I suppose,” Derik said grudgingly.

Surprisingly Reasonable Robed Guy shrugged. “That was mostly Bob’s plan.”

“So we’re
leaving?
” Sara blurted. “We can just go?”

No answer. The robed ones all took turns muttering chants and moving things around on the lab table. Sara pointed to the pentagram outlined in what looked like green chalk, which she had just noticed.

“I have to admit,” Derik admitted, “I didn’t really see this coming.”

“What do we do?” Sara asked, gripping his hand. “Do we leave? We can’t just leave. Can we?”

“I . . . guess not.”

“We didn’t travel all the way across the country so they could snatch a few cc’s of my blood and then kick us out.
We’re
the good guys.
We’re
supposed to save the world from
them
!”

“Hey, Sara, I’m with you, okay? What do you suggest?”

“We stop them from the spell they’re working on!”

“I don’t know if messing with them when they’re in the middle of performing black magic is the best idea . . .”

“True, but I don’t think anything good can come from trying to raise the dead. It’s, like, a philosophy of mine.”

“Even if it is King Arthur who, you gotta admit, would be kind of cool to talk to. Okay.

You stay here. On second thought, you come with me. Maybe if they try to stab me, you can give them a brain-bleed or something.” He gripped her hand, then loosened his grip when she yelped again, and started forward. “Hey! You guys! In the robes! Stop what you’re doing!”

“MODESA NOEKA BIRIENZA DOSEDA NOSEFTA KE
rienba modesa noeka—”

“That’s totally the opposite of stop what you’re doing,” Derik said, and Sara almost laughed. What a day. What a week! Nothing was turning out the way she had expected. Was that a good thing, or a bad thing?

A bubble, poison green and clear as glass, rose from the table, enveloping the chanters as it grew. With every spoken word, it got bigger. There was no pain when it enveloped her and Derik, and no smell. Suddenly, the world was green, and the bubble was still growing.

Derik rushed forward, tossing robed fellows like red checker pieces, and as she hurried to help him, the lab table fell over. The screams of the Chosen Ones almost drowned out the glass breaking.

The world was still clear green—it was like being trapped inside a mucous bubble—but now an ominous humming had started. Sara clapped her hands over her ears—the sound was so low it made her teeth hurt—but the sound went on, and she realized it was going on inside her head.

“We did not finish! We did not finish!”

“Let me guess,” she said, taking her hands down—what was the point? “That’s bad.”

“The moGhurn! The moGhurn!”

Derik was standing, brushing glass and blood off his T-shirt. “What the hell is a moGhurn? And where are all of you guys going?”

There was something in the bubble with them. It was so sudden . . . one minute there was breaking glass and pandemonium and yelling, and the next she felt so heavy she had trouble breathing. The air had gotten heavier, or—it sounded dumb, but—her spirit had gotten heavier. Something had appeared, had been conjured up out of blood and despair and desperate hope, something the sect was trying to run from, but they were all trapped in the green bubble together.

The moGhurn looked like a devil crossed with an elm tree. It had a face, of sorts, and eyes and arms, and was terrible, all terrible—she could think of nothing good to describe it. It swept up members of the sect in its—arms?—branches?—and dashed them to the ground, or pulled their limbs off like her mother used to pull the leg off a chicken, and for a funny thing, it made much the same sound, the sound of gristle tearing and parting from meat, and then she bent, and stared at the green floor, and worked hard on not throwing up.

In the panic she had been separated from Derik, but now the dead gaze of the moGhurn fell on her, and it moved toward her with the rapid, inhuman speed of a snake. She backed up as far as the bubble would let her and she saw . . .

. . . she saw . . .

She saw the sect killed, all of them, heaps of robes everywhere. She saw Derik, dead. She saw the moGhurn reach for her, and then the bubble burst in a feat of amazing and unlikely luck—and the moGhurn, delighted to be free, forgot about her and moved out into the world.

The moGhurn killed everyone in the Boston area, from the oldest man in the Chelsea nursing home, to the infant girl who was born forty minutes ago. This took the demon about two and a half hours. In a day, it had finished with Massachusetts; in a week, the Eastern seaboard. The more it destroyed, the stronger it grew—no magical green bubble to keep it in check any longer—and in a month, North America was gone.

Except for her. Lucky, lucky Sara, spared by the moGhurn, who was distracted at exactly the right moment.

And in another thirty days, she was alone. She was alone in the world. She had not meant to, but everyone was dead all the same, and the moGhurn was still hungry . . . this time, Morgan Le Fay had triumphed, and her reward was a dead world.

Sara blinked, and the bubble was back. There were still bad guys running around in robes—though quite a few of them were dead. Derik was punching the bubble, trying to get out. Everything was green.

She groped, saw what she wanted, leaped for it. An empty hypo amid the broken glass and blood. She pressed the plunger, then pulled it back. Right in the heart. Instant embolism. No more luck. MoGhurn stays put.
Good-bye, cruel world. Oh, Derik, and you’ll never know how brave I was.

No time like the present to find out. She slammed the needle forward, gritting her teeth, and then—

“Ow!”

Derik’s hand, protectively across her chest. Goddamn it! That spooky werewolf speed could be a real pain in the ass sometimes.

“Derik, you idiot!” she shouted. “I have to!”

He jerked the needle out of the back of his hand, then tossed it. “Like hell!” he shouted back. “Bad, bad, bad,
bad
plan. Bad Sara! No suicides today, please. If this fucking weird green circle thing ever breaks, you run like hell, Sara.” He kissed her hard, then thrust her back. “Run!”

She wanted to scream after him but didn’t have the breath—it had been knocked out of her by what she was seeing. Derik was running right for the moGhurn, knocking Chosen Ones out of the way like bowling pins.

“We’re supposed to be scared of a mutated oak tree?” he shouted, then leaped for the demon, who caught him and shook him like a doll.

Shook him like a
doll
?

Her Derik?

Her
Derik?

“Get your tree limbs off him!” she roared, stomping toward the demon. “You piece of shit! You overgrown nightmare from a Tim Burton movie! You leafy motherfucker!
Let him go or I will kill you, I swear it, I swear it!
”

She stomped through broken beakers, barely feeling the glass slice through her sneaker, her sock, her foot. “Right now! Not tomorrow now, not an hour from now,
now,
now!”

It towered over her, and Derik was dangling, limp, from its awful grip. She was afraid, but on top of the fear was anger—true, dark anger, that anyone, anything should treat her love like that. The moGhurn tossed Derik aside like an empty milk carton, and she saw red. Literally, saw red. It was reaching for her and she knew she was no match for it, knew it would kill her—
but that was okay because it looked like Derik was dead, too, so who cared?
—and she did the only thing she could as it bent toward her: She kicked it.

It screamed—horrid, awful, terrible noise—and staggered away from her. This was gratifying, if startling. It screamed, and screamed and shook, and knocked over Robed Ones, and ran around like an evil leafy tornado, and fell over, and twitched like it was being chopped down by a chainsaw, and then it shrank down into itself and disappeared.

Then the bubble popped, and she realized her foot hurt like hell, was, in fact, bleeding pretty good.

“Who cares?” she muttered, racing over to Derik, who was lying in the corner all crumpled and banged up. She skidded to her knees beside him, hesitated,

and then turned him over. He came into her arms with a loose, boneless feel that scared her worse than the tree demon had.

“Derik,” she said softly, and cried at his dear, battered face, the way his head was tipped too far back in her arms—broken neck at the axis for sure, maybe the atlas as well—and the blood, all the blood. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing her. She groped for a pulse, found nothing. Nothing. “Oh, Derik, you big dumb ass . . . you weren’t supposed to die. Me, okay, and the rest of the world—a faint possibility. But not you. Never you.”

But his neck . . . his neck was . . .

Right. She set him down on the cement floor and started a closed chest massage. One and two and three and four. One and two and three and four.
Oh, don’t be dead. Don’t.
One and two and three and four.
Oh, don’t you dare leave me. Don’t you dare. Like I could settle for an ordinary guy after this. Don’t.
And one and two and three—

“Sara . . .”

“Now I’m alone,” she panted. And two and three and four. “Alone with a zillion people in the world, and where the hell am I going to find someone else like you?”

“Sara . . .”

“What?” she wept. She stopped pumping and pulled him back onto her lap. “What, idiot?”

“Where’s the bad guy?” The whites of his eyes were blood red, and blood was even leaking from his left eye like dark tears.

“I kicked him and he died,” she sobbed.

“Way to make . . . make a guy feel . . . useful,” he gasped, and coughed, and now there was more blood, oh, God, like there wasn’t enough before.

“Does it hurt?” she cried. Probably not, she realized clinically; shock would keep much of the pain at bay.

“It’s pretty fucking excruciating,” he admitted.

“It is? Oh my God, Derik, I’m so sorry, let me go pull some robes off these dead idiots, you must be freezing.”

“I just want a drink,” he groaned. “Possibly ten. Help me up.”

She almost burst into fresh tears—he had no idea how badly he was hurt. How he had minutes, at the most, to live. How he had already died, and she’d only brought him back through luck and some brute skill. The damage she could see was bad enough—she couldn’t imagine what had happened internally. Crushed liver. Collapsed lungs—it was a wonder he had the breath to talk at all.
Oh, Derik.
“Just—just lie still and the ambulance will come.”

“Sara, it stinks in here, I’ve had a bad day, and I’d really like to get off this disgusting floor,” he snapped. “Help me up.”

“Just lie still, Derik,” she soothed.

He rotated his neck on his shoulders, irritably, like a man trying to work out a kink. She heard the crackling sound of air popping free of bones, and then he coughed again, wiped the blood off his chin with a grimace, and sat up in her arms. His left eye was still bloodshot. The right was entirely clear.

“What a dump,” he said in disgust, looking around the chaos of dead bodies, scorched robes, broken glass, upended tables. “What a day! Let’s get the hell out of here. Stop it, that tickles.”

She was feeling him all over. “Oh my God. Oh my God! So quick, it was so quick!”

“Yeah, well, superior life form, baby. I told you this already.” He rubbed the eye that was still bloody, and when he quit she saw that it was now clear. “Doesn’t hurt that the full moon’s not that far behind me. And I think you had something to do with it, too.”

“Me?” she gasped, feeling him.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to heal this fast normally. I think your power—your sorcery—I dunno, wrapped me up in a magical envelope, or whatever.”

“Really? Let’s consider this caref—”

“Later. Cripes, I’m sore. What a day.”

“Shut the hell up.” She put her thumbs on his lower lids and pulled them down. The sclera of both eyes were a perfectly healthy pink. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it! It was so fast!”

“Like I said. I think I’ve got you to thank for that. I mean, I’m a fast healer, but that was extra special. Maybe your power sort of wrapped me up, like a lucky hug. Or something.” He grinned. “
I’d
hug you, but first I need a new shirt. And possibly new underpants—that tree demon thingy was scary.”

“What about Arthur’s Chosen?” she asked, almost whispered. She’d never been in a room full of dead bodies before—not since nursing school.

“What about ’em? They’re all dead.
Luckily
, the demon killed them all, and then you fucked him up before he could do anything else.”

“You’re right,” she said after a minute. “I
am
scary.”

“Scarier than taxes, babe.”

He took her hand and led her from the warehouse she’d honestly thought was to become her tomb.

“I GUESS THE QUESTION, ‘WILL THEY BE SURPRISED to see us?’ has been answered,” Sara commented as they pulled up to Wyndham Manor. A huge banner reading GOOD WORK SAVING THE WORLD was strung across the front entryway.

They got out of the car, just as a dizzying parade of people poured out of the doors of the house—mansion, really. Sara found herself picked up and hugged by Michael and several other ridiculously good-looking men she’d never met before. Jeannie was kissing and hugging Derik, and a petite, stunning blonde was climbing all over him like a monkey, laughing and saying over and over again, “You did it! I can’t believe you did it!”