“I’ll be damned,” said Annette. “It actually worked.”
“That was the first step.” I wanted to close my eyes, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to open them again. “We stopped the bleeding. We still have to close the wound.”
Cold blasted from the wall, so frigid it spread a skin of yellow-brown ice across the wall and onto the ceiling. The fire bordering the portal flickered and turned a darker green.
“That can’t be good,” said Annette.
Behind us, Alex gasped. Frost rose from his mouth. A thin layer of dirty yellow ice covered his eyes. His lips were purple, and the tentacle Artemis and I had cut off was regrowing from the stump of his arm, thicker than before.
“Alex?” I asked. “Are you in there?”
“What did you do?” he wheezed. “What’s happening to me?”
“Maybe we should go,” said Annette. “Leave the mighty Hunter of R’gngyk here until his dick freezes off.”
I pulled her back a step, trying to keep us out of range of that tentacle. But it wasn’t coming for us. It stretched instead toward the portal on the wall.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do some harm right now?” Annette asked.
“We cut off the thralls. Ringo’s using Alex instead, feeding through him. We have to—” Before I could finish, a thin tendril emerged from the wall, flattened itself to the stone, and ripped away a chunk the size of a rocking chair.
I reached for my sword before remembering I couldn’t use it anyway.
“Tell me that’s just a shoggoth coming to say hello,” said Annette.
I shook my head. The smell was different from the shoggoth at the Gauntlet—stronger and stranger and unlike anything I’d experienced. It made me think of frozen suns and billion-year-old fossils. And that tendril hadn’t been black but dark and glistening and iridescent, full of impossible colors.
Most telling was the fear I felt from Artemis. I’d never known this fear from the goddess before. She’d withdrawn as much as she could without severing our bond completely, but even so, her instinctive revulsion screamed through my nerves.
“Jenny!” Alex’s voice was weak and raspy. “Help me!”
“I’m truly sorry,” I said. “This is your wiener-dog moment.”
Annette cocked her head. “His what?”
“I’ll explain later.”
Alex strained at the ropes. “I’m a Hunter of R’gngyk. I completed the ritual. I sacrificed—”
“Nobody cares.” I grabbed Alex’s tentacle and tried to hold it back from the portal. “I doubt Ringo’s even aware of you. No more than you’re aware of an individual bacterium in your gut.”
The tentacle was too strong. It tore free, taking strips of skin from my palm in the process, and stretched to touch the crack in the wall.
Alex’s breathing tightened to a barely audible squeak. His heartbeat slowed. His human eye stared blankly at the ceiling.
Two more tendrils emerged from the crack and grabbed the wall. I felt the strain on the stones like they were my own bones.
I pressed my hands to the wall and concentrated on blocking R’gngyk’s way through, guiding and helping the house to fight back. Annette joined me. Together, we shifted brick and stone and old timber from other parts of the house. Thick beams slid through the ceiling to brace the broken wall. Powdered mortar poured into the cracks.
For a while, we held our own. Seconds or minutes, I couldn’t tell the difference anymore as we fought to rebuild and repair what R’gngyk strove mindlessly to destroy.
A larger limb punched through, scattering rock and wood and dust through the basement. It was thick as my neck and segmented like an insect’s leg.
I grabbed Annette and pulled us both down, ducking a blow that would have crushed our skulls. The limb gouged the stone as it drew back.
“Temple, can you hear us?” asked Annette. “I think it’s time for that rocket launcher.”
In my early years, I’d assumed I would die fighting monsters. I’d thought that assumption made me stronger. When death was a foregone conclusion, you weren’t as scared of it.
