The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker (28 page)

Seeing that the room was sufficiently secured, Alexi and the other leader stared at each other and shared a smile. Then the woman turned to Percy.

“Thank you,” Percy said in Swahili.

The leader’s smile grew. “Our pleasure,” she replied. Then she gestured for her Guard to move on. They darted from the room, vanishing though the walls and into the hall beyond, where only Percy could hear the sounds of their distant skirmish.

Alexi nodded to his friends. They nodded back; then the group went to open the ballroom’s hefty doors. Beyond, their beautiful Athens was looking monochromatic. Dust, ash and grime coated once-polished surfaces. The Romanesque arches were graying, and the stones were rougher hewn.

Rebecca patted the walls. “Come now, dear bricks. Don’t fail us now.” Light sparked in the mortar, fighting the contagion.

As she passed beneath the arched ballroom doorway, Percy recalled having been once too terrified to pass through. That breathlessly exciting night of the academy ball, it had been the confidence given her by her best friend—

“Marianna!” she cried. Whirling to the others, who were rushing toward the main foyer, she called, “I don’t know where Marianna is. Aodhan said he would bring her, but I haven’t seen him since the Whisper-world.”

“We can’t have you go looking for her,” Alexi replied.

Rebecca was kinder. Seeing that Percy was beginning to panic, she clamped a firm hand on the girl’s shoulder, trying to snap her into focus. “Do you have any idea where they kept her? Can we access that place from Athens?”

“She was in a room off the threshold where I entered, and I entered from the sacred space below. The chapel. Is there a new door in the chapel?”

“I’ll look,” Rebecca stated. “We shouldn’t all go, and you are most important.”

Suddenly, a noise. While Percy heard it most clearly, they all felt it: the dog, of course, had regrouped. Percy opened her mouth, but it was Jane’s fearful exclamation. “Alexi!”

“You’ll need to go attend that.” Rebecca shooed her compatriots toward the growing howls. “Let me seek out the girl.”

“We shouldn’t split,” Alexi argued.

“Marianna Farelei is a student of Athens Academy. Our students are the only children I will ever have. Now, I am going to bring her home, and I’ll not hear another word about it.” So saying, Rebecca stormed off down the hallway. Michael stared at his companions for a moment before turning to dart after her.

Alexi set his jaw. “Well, friends…”

Percy clenched her fists, resolute. “I rebuked that dreadful canine once before. I’ll do it again.”

All of Athens darkened but for the light of their precious blue fire as they ran toward the chilling noises. The sound rose to an unbearable crescendo. Just inside the Athens auditorium, they stopped. The auditorium was twice its former size, its ceiling having been replaced by a dark and stormy sky. There were no seats, but instead the vast room sloped sharply down in narrow stone steps, like an ancient amphitheatre. Everything was Whisper-world grey.

The steps led to a black stone platform that crawled with movement. No, this wasn’t a platform; it was water black and endless, the river of misery. Behind it fluttered a thick bloodred curtain.

Alexi muttered, “All the underworld’s a stage…” Percy loosed a nervous snicker.

The barking peaked and then went silent, but this was its source. The London Guard pressed into the top tiers of the amphitheatre, and other Guards began to follow suit.

The silence did not bode well. Percy couldn’t swallow for dread. Then, all of a sudden, the curtain was ripped asunder and the dispersed hellhounds came snapping forward, their heads numbering in the hundreds, leashes around their necks pulling something dreadful.

With a bloodcurdling scream, a pile of bones atop crimson fabric drenched in gore was pulled into view. The bones began to assemble in the air as the hounds snarled and drooled; toes built into feet, bones scrabbling upward to form legs and torso, arms and head. And then the blazing red eyes. Darkness’s skull head shrieked, his red robes snapping up around him like enormous wings, liquid flying out from the unfurling mass to spatter them all. “I will drag EVERY. LAST. ONE of you back to the depths!”

The assembled Guards looked down at their clothing, now flecked with red blood.

“Listen,” Alexi cried in their communal tongue. Surely the first of their group had known this day would come, that their ageless forces would need common words. He wondered where in this assembly those souls were, or if they’d somehow managed sweet respite in some Beyond. He wished to thank them, and prayed they were correct in their calculations, if this moment had been their intent. “Our Sacred Lady, now mortal, remains in our ranks! We are unbeatable in concert!
Cantus!
”

A thousand voices rose, sending both Percy and Darkness reeling. A gust of wind was created, an earsplitting force. In return, the infernal dogs howled and lunged, causing shrieks from the front battalions of Guard as pieces of their grey ghost flesh were snagged in hellish teeth.

Darkness did not tick seconds in beauty anymore; in battle he was only bone. He lifted a forearm. The stones below
him shuddered, and a wave of dark water surged forward, a curling tide of hungry horror. Many Guard members screamed, some dragged suddenly forward as if the water had hands, a violent undertow yanking them back across the river, back to their prison. The sight broke Percy’s heart.

Alexi’s eyes had hardened, desire for vengeance pouring from his person in thunderous ferocity. In response, the mist rising from the black death water and the clouds blanketing an unseen sky attacked his mind; these tried to dissolve his will and the wills of the assembled host. The air had been souring for hours. The current atmosphere was one of pain and failure. The ceiling of hazy clouds roiled, descended, swept destructive breezes against cheeks and hands, between Guard members, whispering to each of their greatest fears, sapping strength and confidence. This wind was what kept spirits restless. They could all become so. It would be easier to give up…The Guards’ hope plummeted.

“Hearts, we need you!” Alexi cried in The Guard tongue, giving the command for his absent Michael.

Hundreds of upraised fingers moved in fluid choreography. A warm gust of fresh air blew through the battlefield. The pitch of the clouds lightened. The grey walls flickered with shocks of blue lightning, and the cresting water receded. The Guard breathed deep; there were smiles and surges of hope, the occasional triumphant laugh.

“It’s working,” Percy whispered.

“Leaders, a dam against the tide!” Alexi called, and the other leaders cast forward a brilliant wall of azure fire, corralling the dark river with a barrier it could not surmount.

Percy noticed that from Alexi the Phoenix fire trailed off and away in sparkling rivulets, eddying toward the hearts and hands of the other leaders, he the great mouth of a glorious river. Jane’s healing light was a thin and gauzy line from her own body, creating an intricately woven line like
a luminous Celtic knot to link her fellow healers, and she imagined the other powers were the same. While Athens’s bricks held and sustained Guard power, so did the living Guard remain the conduit. She prayed their strength would last beyond mortal limits.

A few more scattered Guards joined ranks, but Darkness’s cry was a summons for his minions. The crimson robes flying around his skeleton became a flag, his bones the saberrattling call for his spectres to fight with everything they had, to show no mercy. He lifted a bony fist in the air and shrieked, the angry dead and the hellhounds doing the same. Percy clapped her hands over her ears, almost overcome.

“Darkness wants us for his own!” Alexi cried to the other Guard. “But we want Peace! Whatever peace there is to be had.” The academy resounded with his army’s affirmative response, and the great clash began.

Flickering with blue light, the auditorium was awash in battle. Alexi’s command of The Guards was lost to separate instances of chaos. Guards were torn to pieces, but they gave as well as they got, including against the dog creature of one then a hundred forms. The skull head of Darkness swiveled, his vertebrae clicking too loudly, his digits become razors. He was searching Percy out. Alexi stood before her, wondering how long he could hide her in the tumult.

Rebecca and Michael fought off countless dead to get to the chapel, where they found a stained-glass window of an angel that now happened to be a door. Blue light emanated from its sill. Climbing onto the ledge, Rebecca turned the small latch that opened the window. The glass swung inward to reveal a small crypt. Marianna lay atop a stone tomb there, like a corpse, and Beatrice and Aodhan paced to and fro.

The spectral pair turned in great relief to see Rebecca and Michael. Hoisting Marianna up, ash still clinging to bits of
her dress and hair, they practically threw her at Rebecca and Michael, came out, closed the window behind them with a gust of their spirit draft and flew off toward the fray, presumably to their respective Guards.

“Indeed,” Rebecca muttered, readjusting Marianna’s weight in Michael’s hold. “Where on earth do we take her for safekeeping?”

“Do we bring her to the fight so we can keep an eye upon her? Where
is
the fight? I hear only barking but I assume poor Percy’s hearing Armageddon itself.”

Rebecca concentrated, using her senses to isolate the centre of the storm. “The auditorium. But, shouldn’t we keep her outside all that mess?”

“Can we afford to stay separate?” Michael asked.

Rebecca grimly held the door as he carried Marianna into the hall beyond.

“Come out, come out, little whore. I know you’re here,” Darkness sang, his jaw flapping. His sledge was still pulled by hellhounds, his robes dripping a sickening precipitation of gore. The mixture oozed everywhere, the water sapping the will of The Guards, the blood inciting the hunger of the unsatisfied dead.

Keeping to the rear of the auditorium, that wall of stone behind him, Alexi remained a steady conduit, allowing the Phoenix fire to flow through him. But as Percy feared, it seemed it was taking a toll upon his body. But his eyes never left her, ready in an instant to transfer every ounce of his sorcery to protecting her.

Perhaps Darkness’s senses were dulled by not having eyes; surely, he could tell living mortals were in the room. Or perhaps here, with the Whisper-world tied so close, his surroundings all seemed very much the same. A few of The Guards nearest had formed a barrier in front of the living Guard, smashing back those enemies who dared venture too close.

How, Percy wondered, was one to kill a god? It was a problem. Whatever she’d once been, she’d gone and gotten herself mortal. That seemed a distinct disadvantage.

It was as if Darkness read her mind. He called out, “You’ll curse the day you went mortal, pet. I know a few things about you that I’m sure you can’t resist, no matter what form you take,” he added with a giggle. His jaw fell open. Pulpy red liquid poured forth, a vomitous fountain, its sickly sweet smell distinctively rotten fruit.

Pomegranate. Percy heaved at the odour.

“There you are, Persephone, dear. Smell is the most potent of all memories, they say, especially with a mortal nose. It never ceased to turn your stomach—you always promised I sickened you.” Darkness howled with laughter, suddenly rising up nearby, red robes flapping, foul juice dripping. As he advanced, insects and worms sprouted from beneath his bony feet, their scrabbling, writhing forms wriggling forward, desperate to help decompose the living Guard.

Alexi roared and summoned a coil of blue fire. Darkness dodged. His hellhounds lunged forward, but he restrained them and lifted a hand. “Ah, ah, ah!” A slash mark appeared on Percy’s white face, and then Alexi’s, and both stumbled back, their faces weeping blood. Jane was immediately at their side, reversing the damage.

Alexi’s next blast of fire seared Darkness’s shoulder, but the god just laughed. “You’re a broken little human possessed by a feather. Some weaponry,” he scoffed.

“Don’t I have you to thank for it?” Alexi spat. He gathered a seething force that pressed forward in huge, gusting flames, an assault that knocked Darkness back several paces, singed and gouged. The hellhounds retreated, too, echoing their master’s snarl.

Aodhan drifted into view, causing Jane to look up in relief. Percy looked over, too. The ghost anticipated her inquiry, saying, “The headmistress has your friend,” and he
added his efforts to transmitting the winding cord of Jane’s light to others across the battlefield.

Percy’s protective light seared forth from her bosom, illuminating everything around her. Guards close by could partake of this bright warmth, absorbing strength and power against the onslaught. Both Jane’s and Aodhan’s hands changed position, to maximize and reflect her radiance.

“This will never end,” Darkness whispered terribly. “You can’t kill me; mankind made me out of hate and sorrow. But you can avoid this. You can give up. Admit that all these centuries of fighting were senseless. Apologize to the legions of souls you’ve enslaved in this pettiness. Phoenix is broken! Admit it! Return to me, and accept that the greater god wins!”

“Strike!” Alexi cried out, and many Guard who were victorious in their individual skirmishes were now able to lend hands. Roaring bolts of blue fire came from all directions, encasing their foe.

Darkness screamed, still not beaten. “I will take something you love! You keep loving, and so I must keep taking things away! I
will
break this pathetic habit! I don’t love, I take! And because I do not love, I must win!” He turned his fiery eyes upon a new morsel, ever targeting the vulnerable.

Rebecca and Michael were just arriving. As they laid the still-unconscious Marianna on a shadowy ledge, her young and fragile body seized as Darkness appraised her. She shrieked in pain, her eyes opening only for a moment, then closing again in a faint. Michael placed his hands over her eyes. Elijah rushed over to wipe such nightmarish memories utterly clean. Percy’s anger widened her bright light.

The enemy’s army was composed of predators seeking fresh, innocent blood; Marianna was a pure and empty vessel, ripe once more for possession. Nauseating hunger burned in their eyes as they came flying at her, ten then twenty, each trying to gain purchase and seize her for possession. Percy
cried out, trying to go to her, but Alexi kept her pinned within the protective circle of several Guards, her light maintaining a shield that seemed to keep the hounds of Darkness at bay. Her light also fended off his insects of decay.