“It’s no goddamn picnic for me either,” he snapped, but absently, his main focus elsewhere. “If your customers knew what you put in their beer.” Before I could protest that I only thought about it, hadn’t actually done it, he added, “There it goes.”
By “it,” he meant the spring… or now a geyser. We, including Delilah, Abelia, and her men, were standing on hardened, ridged dirt that rose slightly at a fair distance in front of us, and that’s where the show was. I smelled it before I heard it and heard it before I saw it: sulfur, then the sound of boiling… as if something as big as the ocean itself were churning, and finally the explosion of water that hit the air and kept going up. Up. Up, and holy shit. I felt like Moses at the parting of the Red Sea. No, I felt more like an Egyptian soldier just there for the paycheck, wondering where it all had gone wrong as I drank the water down. “How the hell is he doing that?” I craned my head to see the water high above us shimmering with a light that was a pale purple reflection of the sky above it.
“The bacteria in the water,” Rafferty said. “He’s agitated them to a thousand times their normal activity. That light is them dying. He turned them into… hell, stars. But microbial stars don’t live long.”
“Is he going to boil us alive, because, quite frankly, that is the one near death I’ve avoided throughout the millennia, and I’ve no particular interest in it now.” Robin had his sword out too, but for the first time it looked useless and he, thanks to those millennia of experience, was Niko’s equal in swordsmanship… if he was sober. “Although at least these wretched clothes from that equally wretched, low-fashion and inedible food store are machine washable. If I do die, at least my corpse won’t reside in shrunken, wrinkled rags.”
“No. We’re not going to be boiled alive, but you just made me wish we would be,” Rafferty growled.
Rafferty was a lightweight when it came to surviving the puck experience, but he was also right. We weren’t boiled alive. A good portion of the water splashed down about two feet from us… a generous estimate. “Cutting it a little close, isn’t he?” I said it to Nik, because when it came to healing, fine, Rafferty was our guy… Wolf… both. But when it came to logistics in a battle, I trusted my brother over anyone and everyone.
And when it came to the abrupt smell of copper and calcium and the five piles of dust that appeared on the ground behind us, it looked like I didn’t have to worry about trusting or not trusting a certain someone ever again. Abelia-Roo and her men were gone. The scent and the flicker out of the corner of my eye had me whirling around, Eagle pointed-except there was nothing for it to do. A dust buster was the only thing that would be any good now. Niko bent down and ran his fingers through one heap. The residue flew off his fingers, finer than flour dust.
“It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again,” Robin said in a hushed tone, finally impressed enough to be almost quiet.
“Shit,” I repeated, without the “holy” this time. There was nothing much holy about this. She’d been a bitch from Hell, Abelia, one so full of hate and loathing that every foot she put to the earth had most likely poisoned it… with just a slower poison than Suyolak’s version. That she could be gone so quickly and quietly, without a screech or a curse, was shocking and almost unbelievable. Like someone’s snapping the fingers at a town-destroying tornado and its simply disappearing. Poof. Gone.
“I couldn’t protect everyone.”
I looked back, but Rafferty hadn’t bothered to turn around. “They were the ones that caused this clusterfuck. They’re responsible for Suyolak’s escaping that coffin. If someone had to go…” He shrugged again. He did that a lot. It was not my favorite thing, especially under deadly circumstances where I had no control. I had issues with control. We’d all seen that, but tricking myself into believing I had control was something that had saved my sanity more than once. Tricks and wire stitching us together sometimes was all you had, and I was missing it badly now.
“We all make difficult decisions in battle. You are Solomonic in your wisdom,” Goodfellow said to Rafferty smoothly, if hastily. There was nothing wrong with knowing which side of your bread was buttered, and as he’d been alive before bread or butter, Robin had mastered that maneuver.
“If you think your silver tongue will save you, goat, it will not.” It was Suyolak’s voice-a real voice this time, not manufactured in my brain. I heard it. I heard him. “To make it close to a fair contest, he will have to sacrifice more of you. All of you, and even then…” He stepped into sight.
It was darker now and I didn’t have the eyes of the three Wolves, but between the lingering twilight, the rising moon, and the flickering glow of dying bacteria, I could see him as he came around the left curve of the spring. He was human again with flesh, dark eyes, and black hair that touched the ground and that cheerful Rom smile from my dream. It was that damn-are-we-going-to-have-some-fun smile; the isn’t-the-world-one-big-party smile; a have- I-got-something-to-give-you grin. The last one was the one I believed. He had something to give us all right, a great big frigging present, and if it was what Abelia and her men had gotten, we’d be damn lucky piles of dust.
I hadn’t believed in luck since I was five.
“He used them to reconstitute himself,” Niko said. “Abelia and the others. He drained the life out of them to make himself whole.”
“Not only them, Vayash cousin.” He was closer, a little more than seventy-five feet away. Almost nude, he had only strips of faded cloth hanging from him. Hundreds of years in a coffin were rough on the wardrobe. He made a washing motion with his hands and the twisted, foot-long fingernails fell away. “I also took the trees, the grass, twenty-one elk, six bears, two mountain lions, several sheep, and numberless small vermin. Some creatures I didn’t know existed in my time. It’s always a pleasure to kill something new.” He stopped and pointed at me. “You are new.”
“And old and something the world had never seen before. Yeah, been there, heard that,” I snapped, turning back, and this time I had something for the Eagle. I aimed and when the ground came up to smack me in the face, I was more than a little disappointed. Not surprised, no, that Suyolak had given me an invisible swat, but there was a complete lack of satisfaction, no doubt about it.
I heard Delilah’s growl, but it wasn’t her normal one… human or wolf. It was frightened-Delilah, who was never scared, who wasn’t just borderline suicidal against an enemy, but flat-out ecstatic kamikaze all the way. She didn’t fear pain or death. I thought she didn’t fear anything, but I was wrong. I wasn’t the only one. “He is wrong,” she snarled. “Unnatural. Unclean.”
I could smell it, what she smelled. Even on my stomach, facedown in the dirt, I could smell it. It had lingered around the coffin, but his odor this close… It could choke you. It was rotting flesh and disease and mass graves sweltering under a hot sun, but beyond that-beyond who he was to what he was, it was alien. Delilah was right. He was wrong and unnatural. Even the Auphe, twisted monsters that they were, had belonged here. They’d died elsewhere, but they’d risen from this earth. As much as you wanted to deny they were natural, they were actually nature at its most effective. Suyolak was outside nature; a mistake that could destroy what had accidentally spawned a creature it had no hold over. Nature had been an ant creating the foot that would crush it.
I had no idea what was in the dirt I was inhaling, but it must’ve been some potent stuff. Philosophical thoughts in a not-so-philosophical situation by the farthest thing from a philosopher as you could fucking find. Suyolak was one huge-ass mistake. Didn’t need to say more than that. I got my hands under me and started to push up as I felt a hand tangle in the back of my jacket and pull me the rest of the way. Not to my feet, which was asking a little much right then, but to my knees. “What… the hell… was that?” I tasted blood in my mouth and I was hoping it was from a split lip or broken nose, because both of those were better than nearly anything Suyolak could dream up.