Shifter (15 page)

Briony felt the rumbling beneath her feet before she heard it, but once she started to hear it, it was deafening. Hoof beats and running footsteps seemed to come from every direction at once. Briony could hear them, and practically feel them. They were just over…

The gate sprang up without warning, and creatures poured through it. For a second, Vigor and Sophie recoiled, obviously suspecting some kind of surprise attack, but this wasn’t that. It was help. Werewolves poured through the gate, and other creatures came with them. Creatures that came straight from the myths of her world. Griffons and giant eagles, trees that walked like people, and people with skin like bark. And unicorns. They came in their hundreds. In their thousands. And at their head was a unicorn with a golden horn, seeming to glow almost ethereally as it strode towards her.

“You?” Briony said. “But I killed you.”

“Physically, yes,” the unicorn said, the words reverberating out. “But that was necessary. I was the first creature of Palisor, and the first slayer of vampires. I had to die to ascend to heaven to fetch my army.”

“You were the slayer of vampires?” Briony said. “The vampire apocalypse?”

Unicorns couldn’t smile, but Briony suspected it would have if it could. “I was death to them. My horn was. Now, I will be again, if you wish it.”

“So the vampires won’t all be killed automatically?” Briony asked. She had put her trust in that, but she wanted to be certain now.

“No,” the unicorn said. “My horn has much power. Had I lived, it would have heard my will, and my hatred of vampires ran deep. That would have killed them. But I wanted you to have another way. The power to kill, but also the power to change things. And the power to take things from the worlds. Like this army. There are friends of yours here, I think.”

Briony looked around, and she saw that she recognized some of the wolves. Jake’s small wolf form was easy to pick out. Josh transformed back into his human form, nodding to her gravely. Carol also shifted, though she didn’t look happy. Briony hoped she would be, eventually, but Kevin was hers now. Finally, irrevocably hers.

Briony looked around at the battle raging below her on the lowest slopes. Vigor’s army was still fighting hard, the dragons using sheets of flame to keep the vampires back for now, but she knew that without help it wouldn’t be enough. With the army that stood before her though… she could order the vampires wiped out so easily.

Briony shook her head. She wasn’t going to do that. There were better ways. Ways that didn’t involve that kind of killing. She turned to the unicorn.

“I just want them gone,” she said. “Driven back to Xylyx and buried again. There are too many vampires I care about to let you kill them all.”

The unicorn said, “And that is why I let you slay me. To exercise your free will. Very well, it will be as you ask. One final thing. Have you ever wondered why the scepter is
called
a scepter?”

Briony had wondered that a couple of times. It was only a large pendant really. Something that she could wear around her neck on a chain. She’d assumed before that it had been a scepter once, but that the handle had rotted or been destroyed. In that moment though, she understood. She lifted the golden horn of the unicorn that she had been fighting with and took the scepter from around her neck. She could feel them both thrumming with power, the way they had back in her room. She pressed the two together with the scepter as head and the  horn as the staff.

There was a flash of power, and Briony was surprised to feel it flowing through
her
. It was Palisor. The power of the land. The people. The
life
. And in that moment she was all of it. That power poured into the scepter, and it
was
a scepter now, only it was so much more than that. As Briony watched, it lengthened, becoming a staff as tall as her shoulder. A staff that shone golden with power.

Briony lifted it, and that power flashed out as golden light, brighter than the setting sun by far. Where it touched the darkness that flowed along with the vampires, that darkness dissolved, leaving the savage vampires there blinking in the light and even shrinking back from the sheer force of it. In that moment, Briony understood how her father had managed to drive the creatures back.

“Let’s go send these things back to their prison,” she yelled, charging forward. The unicorn’s army charged with her, but that wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was Kevin, in wolf form now and loping steadily by her side. Her husband. Her consort. Her love.

B
riony led the charge, the knowledge of everything she had to do next pounding in her ears as loudly as her blood was right then. Sophie and Vigor, Josh, Jake and all the others ran with her, people she cared about mixed in with the horde of fantastic creatures there to fight against the vampires. And at the heart of them, right next to her, was Kevin. Her husband.

            Just those words were so strange. Strange, but beautiful too. And right, like Briony had always known them. Maybe she had. Despite everything she’d felt for anyone else, despite Fallon, she’d kept coming back to Kevin. Now he was hers, and she was his. She thought about the vampires ahead of them. She was
not
going to let them do anything to ruin their happiness.

            Briony had the completed scepter in her hand, and she could feel the power within it. She ran with it like a spear, somehow knowing that it was the weapon she needed. The weapon they all needed. However far Xylyx was, they were going to force these creatures back into it. They were getting close now, and ahead of them Hugtandalfer warriors fought and died, the inhuman sounds of the vampires mingling with the battle cries of the soldiers. The vampires seemed somehow less organized now, with their shrouding darkness banished. They still attacked ferociously, but they did so individually, not swarming the Hugtandalfer warriors in mad mobs.

            The lines clashed, and for a moment or two, everything was chaos. A vampire lunged at Kevin, and instinctively, Briony thrust the scepter into the creature’s path to block it. The vampire barely brushed the golden staff, but power burst within it, leaving nothing but ashes where it had stood. Briony stared openmouthed at what had just happened. She’d known that the scepter had power. She’d known that it was a weapon, but this…

            She’d spent the last few months trying to strike at vampires’ hearts. That was part of what made them so deadly, because to kill them, you had to come almost within their embrace. If this staff could kill them with just a touch though… Briony swung it experimentally, catching another of the vampires on the leg. Again, there was a flash of golden light, and the creature was simply gone.

            Kevin leapt in after her, biting wherever he could. Briony saw the other werewolves doing the same. Jake seemed almost to be making a game out of it, darting between the legs of the vampires trying to kill them all, nipping and biting where he could. It seemed simply playful, except that every time he bit, a vampire died. Every time any of the werewolves bit, vampires died.

            Archer and the other dragons flew above them, safer now that they had more support. With the werewolves cannoning into the fight on the ground, several of the Hugtandalfer fighters were able to step back and nock bows, using them to target any creatures that tried to jump up to bring the dragons to the ground. That left the dragons free to burn.

            Briony almost reeled back as the first gouts of flame struck the ground, seemingly just yards from her. Close enough at least that she could feel the heat from them. Archer burned a line of flame along the flank of the vampire forces, scything down those creatures that fell within the flames, while Fletcher flew on the other side of them, doing the same. For a moment or two, Briony didn’t understand what the dragons were doing, but then she saw it. They were containing the vampires, stopping them from spreading out around their forces and coming in from the flanks.

            Stopping them from getting away that way too, because then the unicorns and other creatures of Palisor hit them. Briony had been a little worried about that part. Unicorns were beautiful, but she couldn’t see how they could be deadly. These were though. Some struck vampires and trampled them, knocking them down so that werewolves had easy bites. Some tore at them with their teeth and pummeled them with their hooves. More used their horns, piercing the vampires and in some cases killing them outright when they struck them through the heart. With their size and weight, the unicorns were even able to attack some of the strange, chitin covered creatures that skittered along with the vampires, cracking them open or squashing them like bugs. Griffons clawed at them, while eagles intercepted those that could fly as they tried to get away.

            The battle grew more hectic then, and for a moment or two, Briony could concentrate on nothing but the fights immediately around her. She spun the scepter like a baton, keeping it moving, knowing that wherever it struck an enemy it would be enough. She twirled it in figure eights, blurring through the air as it struck vampire after withered vampire. One of the hard shelled creatures with them came forward at her and Briony brought the scepter down on it with an audible crack. Sophie leapt at it, finishing it, while Vigor spun in behind her, fending off a vampire who charged at her back. Sophie smiled at him then in a way Briony had never seen her great aunt smile at anyone else.

            The vampires kept coming. Would they have to kill them all to stop them? No. Briony was sure of that. Her father had driven them back, and so would she. Without the darkness binding them together as it had, they lacked the purpose they had possessed before. They were throwing themselves forward out of wild, animal fury, but even animals could be made to run when they weren’t bound together by whatever power had been connecting them.

            Briony swung her staff left and right, and everywhere it touched, vampires died. Another leapt at Kevin, and she stopped it with a touch. One swung claws at Sophie, and Briony took its legs from under it with her foot before bringing the staff down. Kevin stayed by her, protecting her back, making sure that no vampires could get to her before the whirling sweep of the staff could get to them. Around her, the werewolves bit, the unicorns skewered, and the dragons rained down fire, so that the battle was as hot as an oven.

            Even so, the fight wasn’t all one way. Briony saw a werewolf she didn’t know killed from behind by a vampire that leapt upon it and started rending it with its claws. The werewolf twisted enough to bite it, but by then, the damage was done. Half trained Hugtandalfer warriors fell as they tried to match the efforts of the werewolves, or of their queen. A unicorn collapsed with its throat torn out, in a sight that was uncomfortably close to the way the first unicorn had looked after she had killed it.

            Slowly though, so slowly that at first she didn’t notice it, Briony could feel the tide of the battle turning. Vampires were slower to throw themselves forward now as she attacked, and there seemed to be less of a storm of claws and teeth around the edges of her vision. She saw Sophie actually standing there with nothing to fight for a second or two, when previously her great aunt had been at the heart of the action. The werewolves were still busy biting any vampires they could get close to, but more and more of them were shying away from them.

            Briony charged forward at another knot of vampires. They looked at her for a second or so, and then seemed to make a decision. Or maybe it wasn’t as calculated as that. Maybe it was just their primal instinct for self-preservation. Either way, before Briony could reach them with the staff, they turned and they ran. That was the tipping point. Briony could sense it. She pressed forward, and the werewolves surged with her.

Like birds startled from their perches by the flight of one of their number, the vampires turned and sprinted down the mountain path. Those that didn’t died. When they were coming forward, the vampires were a deadly wave of violence without thought, but that also meant that once they started to panic, they couldn’t stop themselves. They fled, while Briony and the wolves ran after them.

            It would have been so easy to stand there and let them run, but Briony knew that this needed to be finished. Palisor needed to be safe. Briony summoned her magic, sending a burst of fire after the running vampires, then lifted her face to the sky.

            “Archer!”

            The dragon was there like he’d been waiting for her summons. He dropped to earth, letting Briony climb aboard his back before taking to the air again and sending flames to match hers into the ranks of the vampires. The few who weren’t already in retreat routed then. The wolves, the dragons and the unicorns kept after them, leaving behind those Hugtandalfers who were too slow to keep up. Though Briony saw that Fletcher had acquired two familiar silver clad passengers. It seemed that Sophie and Vigor weren’t going to miss the hunt.

            From this height, she could see the point of the burning along the edges of the vampire horde the dragons had done. Flames still licked at those edges, and whenever it looked like vampires might break away to one side or the other, dragons swooped low to add their fire to them. They were funneling the vampires down the path, controlling the route they took as they fled before the rest of Briony’s army.

            How long did the chase take? Longer than any human army could have sustained it, that was for certain. The vampires ran and ran, chased by the werewolves. They hunted the vampires across mile after mile, forcing them back over rocky ground, always in the same direction.

            Briony felt it before she saw it. A scar on the landscape that she felt as though it were part of her. A long, jagged split around which vampires and other creatures thronged, seeming to roll like a dark tide. Briony held out the staff she held, and light sprang from it, illuminating them, almost seeming to push at them as they shrank back before that power. Some of them fled then, heading back into the welcoming depths of the chasm. Others turned tail when they saw the rest of their horde running towards them, driven on by the wolves and unicorns.