Black Frost (24 page)

The second spike, which was from a Hunt body,
actually bounced once and hit a green clad Summer elf in the leg,
but did no damage as it hit flat. He yelped and jumped in surprise
and that’s when Greer yelled in Elfish. The plan was to make it
seem that the Summers and Hunt pack were each trying to renege on
the deal. Whatever he said worked because suddenly all hell broke
loose.

Chapter 23

The Summer warrior whose leg had been slapped
by my thrown dart, whipped his bow off his back, nocked an arrow
and let fly in one continuous motion, hitting a Hunt fighter in the
stomach. Before he could get another arrow, a red and black goblin
had leapt at him, knocking him down but getting stabbed by another
Green soldier in the process. The dart that landed near Greer was
carved with Summer insignia and Greer launched himself at the
nearest Summer fighter, who happened to be between him and
Ashley.

Grabbing Charm with both hands, I heaved her
up the dry riverbank and clambered after her. By the time I made it
to both feet, the three armies were embroiled in combat, every side
fighting for itself. The Queens were pulled back by their
bodyguards, but Morrigan’s protectors only managed to get her a
couple of dozen feet back before the angry queen stopped and turned
back to the fight with a scream of outrage. She yelled a command to
Neeve who stepped forward and began to carve a path toward Ashley,
cutting down Summer and Hunt elves without much effort.

Gywd had started to pull back toward me, the
woman holding Ashley dragging my daughter by her arm, while several
Hunt members surrounded them.

I noticed most of this peripherally, as my
mind slowed down and focused on Ashley. Charm took off and my HK
came up, the red dot of the Aimpoint sight centering on the chest
of the nearest Hunt member. A two round burst thudded my shoulder,
both fat .45’s hitting the red and black clad elf. Moving in short
controlled steps, the HK glued to my shoulder, I kept both eyes
open and began to service targets like I had been taught. Elf, elf,
goblin, elf, all down and dying in four or five seconds time, the
goblin getting a double burst of slugs to end its life. Charm
blurred forward, ignoring everything in her path as she cut a
straight line to Ashley.

The chaos of the melee worked to cover my
approach for a few seconds but then one of my targets shouted as he
fell, and both Gywd and the woman holding Ash became aware of my
attack on their rear. Gywd leapt to the back of the steed nearest
him, then reached down for the female elf to hand Ashley to
him.

Charm arrived at that point and sank her
teeth into the female’s thigh, yanking her off her feet.

Without active thought, I flipped the
selector from burst to full auto and emptied the rest of the mag
into Gywd and his horse-thing. Flipping the double clipped magazine
over I was reloaded and bearing down on my daughter when the arrow
hit my left leg. The pain and shock of the impact stopped my
progress, but the venom did nothing to me as Greer had given me a
second dose of antidote before leaving to get in position. I was
good for several hits before my protective anti-venom would be
overwhelmed.

The archer was a Summer elf who was closing
in on the teenaged girl that was everybody’s prize in this battle,
and he died from lead induced iron poisoning as soon as I spotted
him. Ashley shook free from the elf bitch and started to run my
way. Charm had switched bite points from the thigh to the woman’s
throat, ending her participation in the contest.

I became aware that both queens were pointing
my way and yelling at their troops to stop me, but now I was too
close to Ashley for them to fire arrows or spikes. Greer was
suddenly there, cutting down a Summer elf and a red/black stripped
goblin.

His deadly sister was almost there as well,
sliding through both Hunt and Summer fighters like an NFL running
back through a defensive line, but infinitely more graceful. And
pro-football players don’t generally leave a trail of dead bodies
behind them either. Her twin black blades were morphing too fast
for the eye to follow as she killed two and three people at a
time.

Dropping the sub-machine gun on its sling, I
grabbed both flashbangs and pulled their pins, throwing them into
the crowds of Summer and Winter elves that were now headed my way.
I tossed them far over the front runners to provide protection to
Ash from the iron brads. Both went off and dropped large numbers of
elves, but did nothing to slow Neeve’s approach or keep back the
closest oncoming fighters.

Ashley reached me and I grabbed her with my
left arm and one handed the HK, burst firing from the hip till that
mag was finished. Then I again dropped the HK and grabbed one of my
Father’s dying gifts.

The little green baseball sized sphere was
immediately recognizable to anyone who had ever seen a war movie.
It was a M67 fragmentation high explosive grenade, and its
secondary safety, called a jungle clip, had already been pulled
off, so when I pulled the pin and threw it into the crowd of
rushing elves it proved to be far, far more effective than the
flashbangs.

I’d never handled a frag grenade before, but
I could recall reading a book my dad had about military weapons. If
I remembered right, the M67 killed people within about five meters
and severely wounded out to fifteen meters. Apparently those
numbers would need to be amended for elves, because when the dust
settled on my back where I crouched over Ashley, the steel
fragments had killed dozens out to at least twenty meters and left
a thirty meter circle of writhing, wounded elves that had to number
at least twenty.

The explosion and subsequent pile of bodies
slowed up the tide of attackers somewhat, but didn’t stop it all
together. A Hunt elf in red and black got close enough while I was
ducking the explosion to swing his sword. I blocked the stroke with
the HK, then dropped the gun when its sling got tangled up in the
blade, instead grabbing the bowie knife from my vest and stabbing
the elf in his stomach. I left it stuck all the way to its hilt in
his abdomen and pulled Dad’s Glock .45, making the best use of its
fourteen rounds that I could.

Greer had fought his way to my side,
concentrating his efforts on Summer and Hunt pack elves leaving me
to deal with Winter’s soldiers. A black clad Guardian morphed his
black weapon into a spear, but I triple tapped him, two to the
chest and a final round to the head. I popped off several more
rounds, each finding a target in the mass of attackers, still
shielding Ashley with my left arm.

Lining up my sights I suddenly felt a tug on
my arm just as a shell white arrow punched through it. Dropping the
Glock I pulled the last M67 with my left hand and struggled to get
the pin out.

Neeve was almost to us, Eirwen was lowering
the bow that had pin cushioned my arm, and the two queens were
closing fast. Charm streaked to our sides, huddling with
Ashley.

The arrow must have been lying on a nerve
because one half of my right hand was numb, the fingers useless and
the other was on fire with pain that flared to my shoulder. I
ignored it, blocking it out, just as I blocked out the whirl of
combat around us and concentrated on getting my right index finger
through the safety pin on the grenade. Fumble, fumble, slip, then I
got it, yanking the steel ring clear and holding the armed grenade
up in my left hand for the elves to see. They saw…and stopped. Some
recognized it as the twin to the one that had just taken out close
to fifty elves, but the rest froze because the queens both yelled
commands when
they
laid eyes on it.

The battle came to a sudden screeching halt,
all eyes on the round pound of steel death in my clenched left
fist. I twisted to shield as much of Ashley as I could, putting my
armored body between her and the hordes around us.

“You can’t win with that, Mr. Moore,” Queen
Morrigan pointed out in an Irish accented tone.

“ It depends on your definition of winning.
If I take most of you with me, I’ll count that a victory,” I
replied. My left hand was feeling the strain of holding the grenade
upright, trembling just a little.

“Maybe I can’t rescue my daughter, but I’ve
sure raised the cost of getting her haven’t I?” I continued,
gesturing at the battlefield strewn with bodies. There were well
over a hundred dead elves lying about, some killed by each other,
but I think I had accounted for the most. “By now my world will be
piecing together reports of what has happened. Security cameras
will have captured enough footage to give our governments enough
information to form defenses. I don’t know how many people you
have, Queen Morrigan, but if you spend this many each time you
Gather our children, you’ll be extinct before long.”

Her eyes flashed red…really, I swear, they
actually flashed red, and her perfect features twisted in a rictus
of anger.

“Don’t speak to us of extinction, human! Look
to your own uncertain future!” she snarled. Behind her Zinna’s face
matched her sister’s for anger.

Morrigan raised her arms and a great cloud of
black rose into the sky behind her. Thousands of pucks, tiny wings
humming, filled my sight, all of their predatory eyes locked on
me.

Zinna made a similar motion and a matching
cloud of smaller green and brown Tinks lifted into the air,
glittering compound eyes aimed our way.

Note to self: taunting the Queens of Fairie
equals bad idea.

I looked a Greer whose dark skin had gone
pale, his eyes bleak, then I glanced back at Ashley.

“I love you!” I said.

“I love you too Daddy!” she said sobbing, her
eyes filled with tears.

Then I tucked her behind me, forced my
wounded right hand to the butt of my still holstered Sig and tossed
the grenade straight up over the heads of the Queens.

All eyes followed the little sphere as it
left my hand and lofted into the sky. Time slowed as it tumbled
over, the arming lever snapping out to ignite the primer. Game
over.

An M67 has a four second fuse. Not very long,
but long enough for some.

Neeve responded even as the other elves
watched the grenade with uncertain expressions. She slid forward
half a step, thrusting her right arm skyward, the black coil around
her arm flowing out into an impossibly long, needle sharp shaft.
The grenade was only ten feet overhead, so I had a clear view of
what happened. The needle tip of her frost blade speared the
grenade almost dead center, and I could see the midnight black
material begin to burn and melt even as it made contact with the
steel body of the bomblet. For a split second the deadly elf was
left with a ten foot long lance of black, tipped with a green
grenade. Then the tip of her weapon melted from the steel and the
little orb of death fell to our feet where it sat without blowing
up. Certainly she had overabundant amounts of skill and ability,
yet her luck had to be its equal for her weapon to hit and sever
the fuse running down the inside of the grenade, before the it
could burn to the detonator charge. The odds of anyone hitting the
fuse channel in a grenade are too large to be worth calculating,
yet she did it.

We all looked at the dead bomb, even Ashley
who had refused to remain behind the dubious shelter of my body. I
looked from the bomb to Neeve in time to meet her eyes. My damaged
hand fumbled to draw the Sig, but she simply extended her left hand
and the glittering tip of her other Frost blade was a centimeter
from my eye.

Ashley screamed “NO!” in a voice loud enough
to deafen everyone in a five foot radius, even as Neeve looked to
her mother for the command to kill me.

Morrigan had just started her nod when the
sky went pitch dark and an enormous wind blasted over us.

The pucks and Tinks tumbled from the sky,
washed away by the hurricane gust of wind that came just before the
sun disappeared. All eyes shot skyward as an immense form floated
over us, so large that it took seconds for me to understand what I
was seeing. The body was black and as long as tractor-trailer with
batlike wings that stretched out a hundred feet or more to each
side.

Then it roared and the sound was a hammer
pounding everyone and everything on that field flat to the dirt.
The huge wings back flapped once, twice, pushing another great wind
that sent the pucks and Tinks tumbling across the field.

Gargantuan feet, like bridge supports with
claws, slammed into the ground with enough force to bounce all our
bodies several inches into the air.

Dragon.

All previous concepts of the word fled before
the reality of what I was seeing. Immense, black, bat-winged, with
a long tooth-filled head that would make a tyrannosaur cower. Teeth
like sharpened zucchinis and eyes as big as trashcan lids. Eyes
that glowed yellow.

The dragon turned its gaze down upon the
little group huddled between its feet and brought its head down
till it was only fifteen feet over us. The mouth was so big that it
could have eaten Morrigan’s bodyguard Sasquatch in one bite.

No one moved, all eyes locked on the angry
monster whose body blocked the sun.

“He says to stop!” Ashley said, looking at
the Queens.

The sisters gaped at the tear streaked girl
who was suddenly standing and facing them, unconcerned with the
monster overhead. They stared in disbelief for a second then
glanced back to the dragon.

“He says he’s been waiting for me for
centuries and he will kill everything that threatens me,” Ash said
with a note of wonder in her voice.

“Ash, what are you talking about?” I asked,
not taking my eyes from the monster overhead.

“I can…hear him..sorta…in my head. His name
is Gargax and he could hear
me
from miles away. He calls me
Speaker
?” she directed the last bit to the two queens whose
faces looked to be in danger of freezing in permanent
disbelief.