Wolves and the River of Stone (35 page)

“They’re coming!” Mike said as he spiraled with the flaming hammer and destroyed two more wights. The hammer hissed and a burst of steam shot into the air as the fiery head hit the damp ground closer to the river.

“Who?” I said as Mike brought the hammer down on the wights fighting with the water witches. Bodies and bones erupted into the air on an explosion of water. I slammed another speed loader into the pepperbox and blew another skeleton apart. I grabbed the sword it dropped and hurled it into the woods to disarm the thing before it could rebuild itself. Nixie rode a wave over the wights as I moved toward her and Mike. She stumbled as she hit the grass. I grunted as something grabbed my arm and a sharp pain seared my skin. My hand opened and my staff fell to the ground.

Something hot and thick ran down to my hand as I jerked it away from the skeletal fingers. There was a ragged wound on the back of my wrist and a bloody bayonet in the wight’s hand. The wight still had strips of decayed flesh clinging to its bones beneath its tattered Union uniform. It was coming too fast to aim my pepperbox so I grabbed it with my necromancy, bracing myself for that terrible moment of
knowing.

James Anderson. Fifteen years old, he screamed when his brother died beside him. Face covered in his sibling’s blood, he lost his mind. He didn’t know how he’d be able to tell his mother that his brother was dead. Then something stung him in the back. A cold acceptance of death came to him as the light left his world.

I screamed and dismantled James Anderson to dust. I knew him like he was my own brother. His body left in a cloud and I hoped it would find peace as I turned, tears in my eyes, and unloaded my pepperbox into another wight’s spine.

“Damian!” I turned to see Nixie backpedaling as she screamed,
“Gravemakers!”

I fell to a knee and grabbed my staff as two of them seeped out of the ground between us like ink through water. Their bodies materialized in a blackened brown nightmare of deep cracks and crevices that looked like thick tree bark. The sound of a thousand snapping bones echoed across the field as the gravemakers straightened their hunched forms and opened their milky white, dead men’s eyes. They stepped forward together as their hands began to twitch. One finger jumped, and then relaxed as another did the same, in a nauseating rolling motion.

The wights closest to the monstrosities stopped moving. Their bony skulls turned toward the gravemakers. Each gravemaker waved its arm in a rippling motion ending in a snap, its palms facing the wights. The skeletal bodies jerked and stumbled and fell into bony piles before their bones vanished into the earth.

There was a blur of motion between the wights as a vampire closed on the gravemakers. I recognized Mary’s lithe body as she pulled her feet up in mid-air with her claws reaching for the nearest monster. I didn’t even have time to shout a warning.

The gravemaker’s gaze locked on Mary and it swatted her away like an insect. She tried to scream before her body smashed through a small tree and it joined her in a tumble toward the river. The tree fell slowly as Mary came to a stop. I heard it splash down in the water, but my attention came back to Mike when I heard him swear.

Mike reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a tiny cluster of crystals. My eyes widened and my gut twisted as I realized he was holding a soulstone. Mike threw the stone with a sidearm flick of his wrist. It broke through the gravemaker’s skin and lodged in its head, cutting through the fractured face with a crack. Steam rose from the wound as the gravemaker clawed at the opening. The creature released a horrific moan. The fire demon charged and screamed as he leapt into the air. It happened so fast I barely even registered what he’d done. Mike brought the Smith’s Hammer down on the gravemaker’s head and the body exploded in a hail of fire and a fine cloud of white soul fragments. As fast as it had come, the gravemaker dispersed in tendrils of black and gray smoke.

Mike didn’t have a chance to move before the second creature came at him. I was already charging the gravemaker, hammering wights to the side with my staff. The muddy ground sucked at my boots as I leveled the pepperbox and unloaded all six barrels into the thing’s face. Fire and gunpowder scorched my lungs as I took ragged breaths. I holstered the gun as my grip slid to the blade rune on my staff and my other hand wrapped around the sword hilt at my waist. I stiffened as power was ripped from the nearby ley lines and blended with my own aura to form the aural blade.

“Damian! Don’t!”

I heard my master’s scream over the buzz of power, but I wasn’t going to let Mike die at the hands of a gravemaker. I wasn’t going to let any of us die at the hands of a bloody gravemaker. I brought the pulsing blade of blue, gold, and silver filaments down and cut through its neck. The world stopped as my necromancy flared and was dragged up through the blade until it bit into the creature’s being. And in the heartbeat it took for the power to decapitate the godforsaken gravemaker, my soul burned. I saw the first death and the second, the tenth, the forty-second, the seventy-fifth, the swarm of men and women and children that died in terror and rage to give birth to a devil. I tried to scream, but no sound left my throat. My body seized as it felt the gunfire and the cannons tearing it apart—as if I had been the one to die, and not the hundreds of souls before me. The scents of ruptured bodies and voided bowels grabbed my lungs and squeezed the air out of them. I died screaming a hundred times in a heartbeat before my world went black.

“-u
ck up Vesik!”

Something felt like an anvil as it cracked against my face. The slap was deafening in my throbbing head. I raised my hand to ward off any more blows. “Up, I’m up,” I mumbled. I opened my eyes to find Hugh and a circle of vampires and Fae around me. Hugh had his arm pulled back ready to smack me again until I raised my voice and said, “I’m up!”

“Good, get yourself together. Zola thinks we can stop the wights if we break all the circles.”

“All?” I said.

Hugh nodded.

My eyes roamed the circle and I didn’t see Zola. “Where’s Zola?”

“She ran to help Aideen,” Hugh said. “She chased some of the necromancers to the southeast.” As if in confirmation, something exploded in a thunderclap of sound off to the south. “Haka and I cleared the field through the northwestern trees with help from the vampires, but these men ... they are like roaches.”

I sat up slowly and found Mike on his knees just outside the circle. He had the head of the hammer planted in the ground. The demon was breathing hard, with his hands on the skyward handle and his head bowed between his elbows. He looked at me and one corner of his lips quirked up. “I hate those things.” The cloud of black and gray tendrils was the only remnant of the second gravemaker. “There’s more of the damned things here. I can feel them. Break the circles quickly. I don’t have enough soulstones to keep killing gravemakers.”

I put my hand out to steady myself and bumped into a still form. It was wet and bloody and it took me a second to realize it was Mary. My eyes widened. “Is she?”

“No,” Sam said as she squeezed my shoulder from behind. “But if you don’t get moving we’re all dead.”

I nodded, but didn’t look away from Mary’s battered body. The clash of steel on steel and the more muted sound of steel on bone echoed over the field as the wights continued battling Foster and Cara and the wolves. I caught a glimpse of Sam’s face as she charged into the fray once more. Blood was pouring down her right cheek.

“Foster!” I said, and the authority in my voice surprised me. “Haka! On me.” I launched myself forward and didn’t speak another word.

Foster swept in from my left and Haka’s matted black fur was a mountain on my right. The werewolf’s breath whistled through a deep gash in his snout as he threw himself forward on all fours. Foster’s sword slid through wights left and right with ferocious precision while Haka handled them with vicious brutality.

We hit the first circle in less than a minute. I wrapped my hand around my focus and started to shift my grip on my staff to form a blade.

Foster’s hand clamped down on my staff hand. “Don’t risk anything with necromancy, Zola’s order. Break them with ley lines.”

I nodded and slid the hilt beneath my belt as Foster turned back to the wights. A khaki werewolf bounded past us and snarled as it bowled through a cluster of skeletons. As soon as he was clear I saw one of the other water witches toss the bones back into the river with an eruption of water.

I knelt beside the radiant green glow of runes and circles and cursed. There was enough power pouring out of that single circle to crumble a house. I glanced back at Philip. He was watching me. His arms were crossed in front of him and his face looked calm, interested. The shield around him rippled as a vampire bounced off of it and tumbled into the distance.

The shield. A shield tied to a circle would stop every kind of energy I knew of.

“Foster! Dagger!”

He took down another wight, reached to his calf with his left hand and flicked the dagger into the grass between my feet without even looking. I grabbed the hilt and started dragging it around the circle of power. Foster and Haka beat the wights away from me as I finished the rough circle of my own. I glimpsed one of the necromancers in that mass of pale flesh before he was swept away in a rogue wave of water. My eyes shifted back to the raw wound I’d carved into the earth as I placed my fingers into the furrow.

“
Orbis tego!”

The instant the shield snapped into place the energy in the runes slammed against it and the recoil of power burned across my already blistered hands. I gritted my teeth and held the shield until the line of power running from Philip’s circle shot into the air like lightning. The runes died. I cut a line through them with Foster’s dagger to be sure it wouldn’t be easy to reactivate the circle.

“Next one, on me!” I said.

I glanced across the field as we hammered through the wights. There was fighting in the woods now. I couldn’t see half of our people, but I could hear them yelling and grunting among the constant clatter of bones. I saw Dominic briefly as he tossed a wight into the unnaturally roiling river. Translucent arms reached forward and dragged more of the undead back into the water. The mass of dead flesh continuing to march out of the river despite the efforts of the water witches was terrifying. I spared a glance over my shoulder but could no longer see the cluster of vampires and werewolves we’d left with Mary’s still form.

We carved through another ten of the circles without too much trouble. As we closed on the eleventh, Haka roared and stumbled backwards. There was a bayonet stuck through his hamstring. He went down hard. I moved to help him.

“No,” he snarled. “Finish the circles! I can still fight.”

“Shut up, Haka,” I said as I pulled the bayonet out of his leg. He growled and pounded his fist on the ground. Foster circled us, slashing through bones and armor as fast as he could.

“Foster, close his wound.”

The fairy nodded and knelt as I stood up and swung my staff into the closest wight. The metal and wood slammed the decayed body into the ground, collapsing in a clatter of dry bones. It started to get up again immediately. I blew the wight apart with two quick shots from the pepperbox. Four more shots pushed the closest wights back. The recoil from the gun felt like knife blades on my blistered hands.

“
Socius Sanation,”
Foster said.

By the time I blinked the flash of power away and fought off the next three wights, Foster was beside me with his sword flickering through the bones. Haka jumped back into the fray with renewed vigor, his massive claws raining immediate and brutal destruction.

“He’s not fully healed,” Foster said. “You need to be healed too, D. He’s a wolf. He should be fine. You won’t.”

“Good, I’m going for the circle.”

Foster didn’t answer. He just moved in front of me and collapsed two wights in one strike. Some piece of metal sparked against his sword as the blade moved through the second wight. We moved forward, collapsing Philip’s circles as we were all battered senseless by the release of power at each one.

“This is stupid,” Haka said between gasps for air as we moved toward the last green glow. “The wights are faster, but they’re still no match.”

“I know,” I said. “Philip’s up to something.”

“Trying to tire us out?” Foster said as he kicked another skeleton away. Nixie laughed as she caught the bones and pulled them back to the river.

“Could be,” I said. “It’s sure as hell working.” I fell to my knees and plunged the dagger into the earth. The river was louder near the last circles and it added a constant background noise to the clatter of swords, claws, and bones. With the circle done, I dug my fingers in and said,
“Orbis tego!”

The last bolt of power shot into the skies and the entire cadre of wights collapsed onto the earth, leaving a handful of necromancers exposed across the field of remains. The water witches moved in with the river and started dragging the bones and armor back into the water. One of them managed to catch a necromancer, and he screamed as he vanished beneath the wave. His grasping hand was the last thing to disappear.

“Give me your hand,” Foster said. I held it up and he grabbed it.
“Socius Sanation.”