The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) (29 page)

“What are you doing?” the angel barked.

“Helping,” Pi said.

“As if you could,” he muttered. “Stay out of my way, and if you die, don’t trip me up.”

Pi nodded, drew her blade, and waited for the next attack. When it came it was in force, fallen swarming around them again in a flurry of black wings, darklight, and bodies.

The angel behind them cast out another pulse of light, vanquishing both the fallen and their darklight. Again, when the light pulsed through her, Pi felt the same holy energy infuse her being that she’d felt next to the house.

Pi didn’t waste any time. She struck out with her lightning, infused now with the holy power of the angel. This time when her wyrd struck, it struck true, knocking a fallen out of the sky, crumbling him to the pavement, from which he didn’t rise again. For good measure she sent a lick of wyrded flame his way, igniting his body. In moments the form dissolved, and like those that fell from the white winged angel’s pulse of light, a pinpoint of starlight spiraled up to the heavens.

Clara seemed to catch the drift; she must have felt the same sensation from the angel that they had been infused with back at the Votary House. She blasted out at those angels spiraling high in the night with a cold fire that froze them mid-flight, dashing them to hundreds of pieces against the pavement they fell upon. As with the fire, their bodies dissolved, only allowing one glimmering part of them to rise into the sky.

Pi lost track of the fight, but she knew that she and Clara were now just as much a target as the angel behind them was. Still she fought on. It wasn’t only her wyrd that was infused with the holy energy that allowed her to kill the angels, but also her weapon. She found that out when some angels got too close for her to react with wyrd, and she had to strike out with her sword. Great fissures were opened wherever she struck, and the holy power infused in her blade snuck in, burning the fallen from within with holy fire.

As Pi saw a turn in the tide, she began to have hope. The fallen attack was thinning; more sorcerers were gathering closer to where they stood, ambling toward the pulse of light from wherever they’d been fighting before.

Just as Pi thought they might win, a concussion vibrated through the air, and sorrow rippled out from the Votary House.

“Atorva!” the angel said, turning to the Votary House. That moment was enough of a distraction for the fallen angels to act. White feathers filled the air, and blood cascaded to the ground. The angel screamed out in pain, and Pi looked behind her to see one bloody white wing fall to the ground.

Their protecting angel slumped to the ground, one wing treading air, the other nothing more than a bloody stump writhing back and forth, trying to work a wing that was no longer attached to his body.

Behind him the red-headed angel stood, her sword slick with blood.

“I asked where you were going. It’s rude to ignore people.”

“Deven?” Clara said, looking back toward the house, but there was no sign of her brother.

Devenstar’s head was ringing. He came to in the bushes, a blast of wyrd having carried him there. But for some reason the angel hadn’t killed him. He wasn’t sure why she hadn’t, and he could think of a million reasons why she should have. A pulse of darklight would have done it, sent him beyond the Black Gate and out of her hair. But before a blast of force from her had smashed him against the wall and into oblivion, she had seen the pulse of white light from the angel on the corner, and she’d turned that way.

Slowly he picked himself out of the bushes, untangling dead leaves and twigs from his hair. His back hurt, and he was pretty certain his shoulder was dislocated. Given what could have happened, he shouldn’t be complaining, but
damn
did it hurt!

He slumped against the wall, anchoring his arm on a window ledge, and heaved himself down on his shoulder. Blind pain shot through his body as the joint slipped back into place. Devenstar crumpled to the ground, half in the low shrubs and half out. He bit back a curse even as he groaned in pain. But at least he could use his arm again.

When he sat back up he realized the fallen angels were nearly gone, and those that were left were already engaged by other wyrders. Deven only had mind for one fallen, and she had vanished somewhere into the gloomy morning light.

He stumbled down the knoll and toward the white-winged angel. Logic said that was where he would find the red-headed angel.

Then a wave of sorrow swept over him from the house behind him. The air vibrated with it. Devenstar was nearly taken to his knees, but he stumbled on, even as the angel he traveled to turned and screamed a name at the house.

As if in slow motion Devenstar saw the red-headed angel step up from behind the white-winged angel and slice through its wing, right at the base where it met his body. The angel fell to his knees, a scream of pain on his lips.

Deven wasn’t going to make it in time, not to save his sister and Pi. The fallen lifted her sword, stepped around the angel, and brought her blade down. Before she could finish her strike, Deven blasted her with golden lightning. It wasn’t enough to harm her, not since the holy energy that had empowered his wyrd before was fading, but it was enough to distract her.

The white-winged angel stood, rounded on the fallen, and let out a pulse of white light into the dismal morning. The red-head fell to her knees, crumbling to ash as she drifted to the concrete. One point of starlight drifted up and away from the scene.

Content that it was over, Deven slumped to the ground, fell to his back, and gazed up into the smoky sky.

Dalah wasn’t sure what happened. At one moment the High Votary was praying, and the next, his slack hand was slipping from her grip. She was still coming to grips with her surroundings when something struck Flora, flipping the older lady over the edge of the building and out of Dalah’s reach.

A laugh behind her made Dalah turn. She saw the weathervane sticking out of Atorva, pinning the High Votary to the rooftop, his blood pooling under her slippers. She was still numb with what happened to Grace, and wasn’t really feeling anything, only seeing it. Knowing the High Votary was dead registered with her, but didn’t sink in right away.

“And now we are alone,” a deep voice said.

Dalah’s eyes drifted away from the sight of Atorva and to the fallen angel who’d killed him. The angel was as thin as a wisp, with little to no muscle that Dalah could see. His lank brown hair hung in tangles around his angular face. The only thing robust about him were the majestic black wings that fluttered overhead.

He smiled at her and started to say something, but Dalah’s eyes fell to the broken basilica that buried her lifelong friend beneath its rubble. She thought of Grace, the bossy, bitchy hag she had come to love like a sister. The woman who said all the things Dalah thought but was too polite to voice. The way Grace fiercely defended those she loved, even if she was defending them to another person she loved.

As if by thinking her name, the image of Grace came to her: broken, bleeding, and dead beneath the pile of stone.

And then something snapped inside of Dalah. She felt the ebbing holy energy of Atorva washing away from her body, back to the building. But she pulled on it before it could go any further. In anger she lashed out, the pure holy energy mixing with her own wyrd. Thousands of barbs of ice shot from her skin, embedding themselves into the angel before her, lancing holy energy through his body. He gasped, rocked back, and made to leap into the air.

But the attack had weakened him, slowed him down. With a strength fueled by wyrd, Dalah yanked the weathervane from the Atorva’s body and jammed it through the angel’s chest, carrying her weight through the strike to pin him to the rooftop.

“How do you like it, you unholy son of a bitch?” she seethed.

He gasped for air, gasped for life. His hand quivered as he reached up to her, pleadingly. His mouth moved through the pain, like he was trying to say something, but Dalah only twisted the weathervane.

“You were nothing more than a wretch in your human life. Becoming Arael’s lapdog didn’t change a thing, it only gave you wings. And I will take them away, you bastard.” With a force of wyrd she lit his wings aflame, slowing the hunger of the fire to a slow smolder, melting the feathers and pooling the skin of his wings beneath his body like wax from a candle.

She watched the angel gasp for breath, unable to die, but mortally wounded. She crossed her arms and stood there. He reached out to her with pleading fingers, begging her to end his life, but Dalah refused.

“You will die here alone,” she said. “With no one here to love you, no one to mourn your passing.”

She walked around him. “That’s what dalua like you deserve. No love, no remorse, only unadulterated slaughter.” And then with one final pulse of wyrd, the flesh was stripped from his bones, carried up into the air with the force of Dalah’s mind. Moments later his body crumbled to dust at her feet. As the ashes of his passing twisted into the air on the morning breeze, one point of light started spiraling up to the heavens.

“No,” Dalah said to it. “You don’t get to be reborn from this. You aren’t forgiven.” She reached out, took the cold light into her hands, and with a lick of wyrd, extinguished his light forever.

“So that’s it?” Pi asked, resting her hands on her knees. “We made it?”

“Some of us,” the angel said, he limped up the knoll toward the basilica and sat down heavily on the stairs.

“What’s that noise?” a sorceress near Pi said.

Pi cocked her head to listen. A moaning, gurgling noise could be heard, coming from beyond the veil of smoke created by burning buildings and fire. A strange, listing shuffle arose out of the morning light, and shapes, just out of sight, lumbered closer to their group.

Something inside of her body screamed in horror at what came, even if she didn’t fully understand yet what she was looking at. Her wyrd reacted, or maybe some deep-seated survival instinct. She grabbed Clara and pulled her toward the Votary House.

“Run!” she demanded, cresting the knoll and darting for the building. Screams rose up behind her, some ending in a liquidity that made Pi blanch.

“What the Otherworld?” Devenstar cursed, sitting up in the lawn as Pi and Clara thundered by. “Dear Goddess.” Deven stood and pounded past them, hammering on the door of the High Votary House, but it was locked from within.

“Hurry!” Pi said, not wanting to look behind her, but when Clara retched into the winter-withered bushes, she couldn’t help but turn.

Corpses. Hundreds of dead bodies were crowding the streets of Lytoria. Bugs, clouds and swarms of pestilence blanketed the sky, blocking out whatever meager light had accrued since dawn. That same survival instinct screamed in Pi’s blood. She knew she didn’t want those bugs anywhere near her.